Redirects (old website links)

When you bring a club's old website across, every address people already have — the bookmark, the link in an email from 2019, the one a league site points at, the one Google has indexed — needs somewhere to land. This is the screen that keeps them working. You'll find it under Website management → Redirects in the admin sidebar, next to Migration; the screen itself is headed Old website links.

It shows what an import worked out, lets you correct any of it, and — the part that matters most — lists the old addresses we could not match to anything, so you can point them somewhere yourself before you move your domain. We never guess. An old address nobody points anywhere is a page that will 404 the day you cut over, and putting that list in front of you beats inventing a destination that looks plausible and sends a visitor to the wrong page.

This is part of site migration, which isn't switched on for every organisation yet. While it's off you'll see a preview of the screen rather than a working one. It unlocks by itself when the feature launches; there's nothing for you to set up.

Who can use this

Admins only. Moderators don't see the item in the sidebar and the page won't open for them — every redirect is a write to a table only an admin role can touch, so a moderator would reach a form that could never save.

What's on the page

• "N old addresses have nowhere to go" — at the top, deliberately, because these are the ones that will show a "not found" page the day your domain moves. Grouped so a whole section of your old site can be dealt with together, and each one lets you type a destination.
• "N old addresses that will keep working" — everything already mapped, least certain first so anything worth a second look is at the top. Each row says how we know, from We imported this page (the strongest) through Already on your site, Our best match and Worth checking, to You set this for anything you typed.
• Add an old address — for one no import ever saw: a paper flyer, an old newsletter, a link on somebody else's site.
• Worth knowing — the practical caveats, repeated on screen where you'll actually read them.

Step by step

Read the unmatched list first

1. Open Redirects after an import has finished. Start at the top.
2. For each unmatched address, decide where a visitor arriving there should end up. Often that's the closest equivalent page; sometimes it's your home page; occasionally it's genuinely nothing, and leaving it is a fair decision.
3. Type the destination as a path on your new site — /about, /news, /teams/seniors. Save.

Check the ones we worked out

1. Each mapping says how we know. We imported this page means the import wrote that page, post or event from that old address — the strongest kind, because it's a record of what happened rather than a guess about two similar-looking addresses. Already on your site means your new site already had something at that address. Our best match and Worth checking are weaker and are sorted to the top for that reason.
2. Spot-check a few. Open the old address on your new site and confirm you land where you expect.
3. Correct anything wrong by editing the destination. An edit of yours is never overwritten by a later import — once you've had an opinion, we keep it.

Add one by hand

1. Use Add a redirect for an address no import saw.
2. The old address is a path from your old site, such as /join-us. Leave the old web address blank to cover every domain you've used, or set it to match one specific old domain.
3. A redirect that points at itself is refused rather than saved — that's a loop, and a browser gives up on it.

Then cut over

1. Redirects only earn their keep once the old domain points at us. Work through Domains to connect and verify your address, then change your DNS.
2. After the change, spot-check half a dozen old addresses on the live domain and confirm each answers with a permanent redirect rather than a 404.

Field reference

Tips & FAQ

• Does this keep our Google ranking? It's what makes keeping it possible. A permanent redirect is how you tell a search engine "this page moved here", and it's the mechanism ranking is transferred by. It isn't a guarantee — ranking depends on far more than redirects — but without them the old addresses simply 404 and everything they'd earned is lost.
• Some old addresses aren't matched. Why not? Because we don't guess. Where the import wrote a page from an address, we know where it went. Where it didn't — a page we skipped, a page you deleted, or an address whose identity lives in a query string like /index.php?id=42, which older sites use a lot — there's nothing to derive a destination from. Those are listed for you rather than pointed somewhere plausible-looking and wrong.
• Do I need to enter every spelling of an address? No. One row covers them: upper and lower case, with or without a trailing slash, with or without .html, .php or .aspx, and /index.html treated as the folder itself. Anything after a ? or # is ignored when matching.
• I edited a destination and the old address still goes to the old place. Give it five minutes. Each of our servers keeps the redirect list in memory for a short while, so a change reaches them within about five minutes rather than instantly. This is worth knowing before you conclude something is broken.
• A destination stopped working. A destination is a path, not a link to a particular page — so if you later rename or delete the page it points at, the redirect faithfully sends people to an address that no longer exists. If you rename something, check whether a redirect points at it.
• Can I redirect to another website? No. Destinations are paths on your own ClubHelix site.
• What about our old site's own redirects? Any redirects configured on your old platform disappear when that site does. If your old site was already redirecting an even older address, add that address here too, or the chain breaks at the cutover.
• Should I keep the old site running? You can't keep both answering the same domain. Once the domain points at us, we serve it — which is exactly what makes these redirects work. Keep a copy of the old site's content until you're happy, not the domain.
• Nothing is listed at all. This list comes from an import. If you built your new site by hand, there's no inventory of old addresses to work from — add the ones you know about with Add an old address.
• A page I know about isn't in the list. We can only list the addresses we found when we read your old site. A page nobody linked to, and that wasn't in the sitemap, was never seen — add it by hand.
• The list says there are more. A very large old site is listed in one batch at a time. Deal with the ones shown, reload, and the next batch appears.