Free Redirect Map Generator

A redirect map is the complete inventory of every URL on the old version of a site, paired with the URL that replaces it on the new one. It is the single artifact a migration lives or dies by. Everything else, the .htaccess file, the Nginx block, the Cloudflare list, is just a rendering of that table into a syntax a particular server understands.

Single-rule generators, including the two we publish ourselves, handle one rule at a time. That is fine when you rename a page. It is useless when you replatform a 4,000-page catalogue, because the errors that sink a set of bulk 301 redirects are not syntax errors in a single rule, they are relationships between rules: two rows claiming the same source, a destination that is itself a source, a pair that quietly points at each other. Those only become visible when the whole map is in one place, which is exactly what a real redirect mapping tool has to do.

The other reason to write the map before you write any config: it is reviewable. A product manager can read a two-column table and tell you that /pricing should not be going to the blog. Nobody reviews a thousand lines of RewriteRule. Build the map, get it signed off, then let the generator produce the server syntax. For the wider strategy around launch day, see our guide to website migration redirects.

The URL mapping here is deliberately simple and explainable, because a score you cannot reason about is a score you cannot overrule with confidence. There is no model and no crawl involved: the only inputs are the two lists you paste, and the whole calculation is written out below, so you can predict what it will do before you run it.

Each URL is reduced to its path, lowercased, with the file extension and any index.html stripped and the trailing slash removed. That path is then split into words. Every old path is scored against every new path on two things: how many words the two paths share (measured as the overlap between the two word sets), and how many single-character edits it would take to turn one path into the other. A small bonus is added when the last meaningful word matches exactly, because that word is usually the slug. The final score is a weighted blend, shown as a percentage next to each row.

Assignment is greedy and one-to-one: the highest-scoring pair in the whole grid is locked in first, then the next highest pair that does not reuse either URL, and so on. That is what stops fifteen old blog posts all claiming the same new landing page. Old URLs that run out of candidates come back with an empty destination and get flagged, which is the honest answer: that page needs a human decision, or it needs to return 410 Gone.

Override anything. Each row keeps its runner-up candidates in a dropdown, and the destination field is a plain text input, so you can paste a URL that was never in either list. The moment you edit a row the confidence badge disappears, because the number described the machine's guess and it no longer applies to your decision.

The 308 detail catches people out on modern stacks. Next.js documents that permanent: true emits 308 and permanent: false emits 307, precisely so the HTTP method is preserved across the hop. For search engines this is fine, 308 consolidates the same way 301 does. But if a compliance checklist, a client, or an old HTTP client specifically demands a 301 on the wire, you need the statusCode property instead. This generator switches to statusCode automatically when you select 301 or 302, so the export always emits the code you actually picked.

How long do you keep the redirects? At minimum a year. Search engines need a few crawls to swap the URL in the index, but backlinks, bookmarks, QR codes on printed material and links inside old email campaigns take far longer, and some of them never update. If a redirect is cheap to keep, keep it. Deleting a map after six months is how sites quietly lose the link equity the migration was designed to preserve.