What are Legacy URLs?
Legacy URLs are essentially 301 redirect pages. You can map "Legacy" (meaning older) URLs from your old sitemap to your new sitemap so that users do not receive "404 errors" for bookmarked pages or search results. This can be beneficial to your site's SEO. A Legacy URL can also be used to direct a visitor from one URL on your site to another one anywhere on the web.
Setup a Legacy URL:
- Select the Settings icon in the gray navigation bar and select Legacy URLs under the Settings header.
- Complete the first field (Redirect from) with the URL that users will enter in their browser. Do not include the domain name, only everything after the forward slash at the end of your domain, like this: "/web-store"
- Complete the second field (Redirect to) with the URL that the users will actually arrive at. If you type the name of a page on your site, you can select it by its title. You may also enter a URL, such as "/store"
- Select the blue Save button to add your new Legacy URL redirect.
Note: Even though Legacy URLs don’t trigger the Publish button, it’s recommended to republish after adding Legacy URLs. This will ensure the redirects take immediate effect by clearing the internal cache of the website.
Redirect URLs in bulk
If you have multiple sub-pages that you need to redirect, then you can use a shortcut by using a "wildcard redirect" (also known as a "catch-all redirect"). For example, if you need to redirect every blog post listed under your Blog page, then you can redirect all of them at once by using a wildcard redirect:
- The URLs for your blog page might look something like: mywebsite.com/blog/blog-post-1
- If you need to redirect just one blog post, then you can enter blog-post-1 in the Redirect from field.
- If you instead need to redirect all blog posts, then you can enter the wildcard redirect blog/ in the Redirect from field. This will redirect any URL that follows blog/ in the URL string (in this case, every blog post on your Blog page).