# How long should I keep redirects after a migration? > Keep your redirects at least about a year, so search engines have fully processed the move and transferred signals to the new URLs, and keep indefinitely any redirect whose old URL still receives traffic or has backlinks pointing at it. The reason there is no short, fixed expiry is that two different clocks apply. The search engine clock is the shorter one: search needs time, commonly cited as at least around a year, to recrawl the old URLs, follow the redirects, and move ranking signals across, after which the redirect has done its job for search. The visitor and backlink clock is effectively permanent: people who bookmarked an old URL, and other sites that linked to it, do not update those links, so a redirect that still catches real visitors or carries link value should stay in place for as long as that is true, which can be indefinitely. The practical rule is therefore: never remove redirects as a quick cleanup, keep everything for at least a year, and keep permanently anything still used or linked. WPBuildAI scans your site and returns the URL list, so you can see which old URLs still attract traffic or links and must keep their redirects. Source: https://wpbuildai.com/how-long-should-i-keep-redirects-after-migration/ By lawrence-arya ยท 2026-06-12 --- Keep your redirects at least about a year, so search engines have fully processed the move and transferred signals to the new URLs, and keep indefinitely any redirect whose old URL still receives traffic or has backlinks pointing at it. The reason there is no short, fixed expiry is that two different clocks apply, and they run at very different speeds. The search engine clock is the shorter one: search needs time, commonly cited as at least around a year, to recrawl the old URLs, follow the redirects, and move ranking signals across, after which the redirect has done its job for search. The visitor and backlink clock is effectively permanent: people who bookmarked an old URL, and other sites that linked to it, do not update those links, so a redirect that still catches real visitors or carries link value should stay for as long as that is true, which can be indefinitely. The practical rule is therefore: never remove redirects as a quick cleanup, keep everything for at least a year, and keep permanently anything still used or linked. WPBuildAI scans your site and returns the URL list, so you can see which old URLs still attract traffic or links and must keep their redirects. The figure people repeat is 180 days, which is the Change of Address window rather than the redirect window: Google's own guidance is to keep the redirects in place for [a minimum of one year after the move is complete](https://ppc.land/googles-site-move-guide-now-covers-www-and-non-www-domain-variants/), so treat the Search Console signal and the server rules as two different clocks. ## Two clocks, not one The question feels like it should have a single number, but it does not, because a redirect serves two audiences with different timelines. One audience is search engines, which use the redirect to understand that a page moved and to carry its ranking to the new URL. The other audience is people and other websites: visitors arriving from a bookmark or an old link, and the external sites whose links still point at the old address. Each audience keeps the redirect useful for a different length of time. Confusing the two is what leads people to remove redirects too soon, thinking only of search. Once you separate the clocks, the right policy becomes clear, and it is mostly about keeping redirects far longer than instinct suggests. ## The search clock: at least about a year For search engines, a redirect needs to stay long enough for them to recrawl every old URL, follow it, and transfer the ranking signals to the new page. This is not instant, because recrawl happens on the engine's schedule, and the common guidance is to keep a 301 in place for at least around a year so the move is fully processed, consistent with how the [redirects guide](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects) and [site move guidance](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes) describe sustaining redirects through a move. Removing a redirect before search has finished migrating the signal can undo the transfer, so the old page loses what it was passing along and the new page does not fully receive it. A year is the floor for search, not because the date is magic, but because it gives recrawling enough time across the whole site. ## The visitor and link clock: effectively permanent The second clock rarely stops. Every external link to your old URL, and every bookmark a person saved, continues to point at the old address indefinitely, because the people who made them will not update them. So a redirect that still catches those visitors, or still carries the value of those backlinks, remains useful for as long as the link exists, which in practice can be forever. This is why valuable redirects are effectively permanent infrastructure, not temporary scaffolding. The link value a 301 carries, discussed in [does a 301 transfer link equity completely](/does-301-redirect-transfer-link-equity-completely), only keeps flowing while the redirect exists, so removing it discards that value as surely as deleting the page would. Treat redirects with live links as permanent. ## When a redirect is actually safe to remove This does not mean every redirect must live forever; it means you decide per URL with evidence. A redirect becomes safe to remove when its old URL no longer receives meaningful traffic, has no backlinks worth keeping, and search has long since moved on, typically well past the one year floor. Many redirects meet that bar eventually: deep, forgotten URLs that nobody links to or visits. A smaller set never does, because they keep attracting links and clicks. So the answer to how long is not one number but a test you apply later: keep all redirects for at least a year, then retire only the ones that the data shows are genuinely unused. Web Almanac 2024 ([HTTP Archive](https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2024/)) is a reminder of how many URLs accumulate, so reviewing them periodically is reasonable, but only with data in hand. ## Why early removal is the real risk The danger this whole topic guards against is the well intentioned cleanup. Someone decides the redirects are clutter, or that the migration is old news, and removes them in bulk. Immediately, every external link and bookmark to those old URLs hits a 404, visitors are lost, and any link value the redirects were carrying is discarded, which can cause a delayed traffic drop that is hard to trace back to the deletion. This is essentially the same damage as never setting the redirects in the first place, covered in [recovering traffic after forgetting redirects](/forgot-to-301-redirect-recover-seo-traffic), only self inflicted later. The lesson is that redirects are cheap to keep and expensive to remove, so the default should always be to keep them unless the data clearly says a specific one is dead. ## Balancing longevity with redirect hygiene Keeping redirects for a long time does not conflict with keeping them clean. A redirect that stays for years should still resolve in a single hop, not grow into a chain as later migrations stack on top of it, because chains waste crawling and dilute value, as covered in [how many 301 redirects are too many](/how-many-301-redirects-are-too-many-seo-speed). So the policy is keep long, but keep tidy: when a new migration happens, update old redirects to point straight at the newest URL rather than chaining through intermediate ones. Longevity and hygiene work together. You are maintaining a permanent but well organized map from old addresses to current ones, not letting an ever growing tangle of redirects pile up unmanaged. ## Steps to decide how long to keep each redirect 1. **Keep every redirect** for at least about a year after the migration. 2. **Never bulk remove redirects** as a routine cleanup. 3. **Check each old URL** for remaining traffic and backlinks before retiring it. 4. **Keep permanently** any redirect whose old URL still gets traffic or links. 5. **Retire only** the redirects the data shows are genuinely unused. 6. **Collapse chains** to single hops when later migrations stack redirects. ## Worked example: reviewing redirects two years on Imagine a site that migrated two years ago and now wonders whether it can clean up its redirects. Rather than removing them by date, the team pulls the data: for each old URL, do any visitors still arrive, and does it have backlinks. Most of the old deep URLs show no traffic and no links, so those redirects are safe to retire. But a cluster of old URLs still receives steady referral traffic and holds backlinks from industry sites, so those redirects stay permanently. They also find a few redirects that now chain through an intermediate URL from a smaller migration last year, and they collapse those to single hops. The result is a leaner but safe redirect set: the dead ones gone, the valuable ones kept forever, the chains fixed. They kept what links and traffic still needed, exactly the value protected in [keeping backlinks when migrating](/how-to-keep-backlinks-when-migrating). ## Limitation: there is no universal expiry date It is honest to say that anyone offering a single, short number is oversimplifying. There is no universal date after which all redirects are safe to drop, because it depends on whether each old URL is still used or linked, which varies enormously across a site. The at least a year figure is a floor for search processing, not a removal deadline, and the visitor and link clock can run indefinitely. So resist the urge to set a blanket expiry. The durable policy is keep by default, retire only with data, and keep valuable redirects permanently. Treating redirects as disposable on a timer is the mistake; treating them as a maintained, mostly permanent map is the right model. ## Common mistakes - Setting a short, blanket expiry date for all redirects. - Removing redirects as a cleanup without checking traffic and links. - Forgetting that external links and bookmarks never expire. - Retiring redirects before search has fully processed the move. - Letting kept redirects chain instead of collapsing them to single hops. ## Key points Keep your redirects at least about a year so search fully transfers signals, and keep indefinitely any whose old URL still receives traffic or has backlinks, because external links and bookmarks never expire. There is no single short expiry, since a redirect serves both search engines, on a roughly one year clock, and visitors and linking sites, on an effectively permanent one. Never remove redirects as a routine cleanup; instead, after the one year floor, retire only the specific redirects your traffic and link data show are genuinely unused, and keep the valuable ones forever. Maintain longevity and hygiene together by collapsing any chains to single hops. Redirects are cheap to keep and expensive to remove, so keep by default and decide per URL with evidence. WPBuildAI scans your site and returns the URL list, so you can see which old URLs still attract traffic or links and must keep their redirects. Send your web address for a free analysis. Not affiliated with WordPress, Lovable, Webflow, Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace.