Redirect chains after a migration

After a migration they stack. Old blog URL to /blog/, then /en/blog/, then the new slug. TTFB suffers. Crawlers follow a few hops and stop. Your bookmark still works. That is the only upside. Search Console keeps indexing the hop as if it matters.

Export what is there now. Crawl, logs, Search Console. Draw old → new. One 301 per path. Host rules (http/https, www) in one go, not as three separate tricks. Trailing slash in the same hop. A 302 marked “temporary” for two years is a 301 someone forgot.

The hop “for people with an old favourite” can go if that favourite has been riding the chain for two years. Those people will arrive in one hop too. And pull the middle URL out of the sitemap. Otherwise you promise an address that immediately leaves.

Keep watching this in the weeks after launch. I would not leave chains longer than two steps. The talk with whoever runs the server gets shorter when you already have the list. Print the hops. Arguing that “it feels fast enough” rarely beats a table.

Old 302s from an A/B test linger too. They belong in the same clean-up. And if the CDN and the app both redirect, you count two hops before you see HTML. Pick one place that steers. The other lets traffic through. Dull. It also saves you TTFB.