A redirect is an automatic rule that sends anyone visiting one web address straight on to a different one. The visitor types or clicks the old link, the server quietly forwards them, and they land on the new page without doing anything extra. It happens in a fraction of a second.
Think of it like a mail forwarding order at the post office. You move house, but letters sent to your old address still reach you because the post office redirects them. A web redirect does the same for a URL: the old address keeps working even after the page has moved or been renamed. The type matters a lot. A 301 redirect is permanent and passes ranking to the new page, while a 302 redirect is temporary and tells search engines to keep checking the original. Pick the wrong one and you either lose ranking or trap a temporary page in the index for good.
Redirects are how you avoid dead ends during a site rebuild or a product move. Skip them and old links return a 404, frustrating visitors and leaking SEO value. Done right, they keep every old link alive and prevent a pile of broken links. Watch out for chains, though. If page A points to B, B to C and C to D, every hop adds delay and bleeds a little authority, so the cleaner move is to send A straight to D. You set these rules in a server config file, a CMS plugin or your hosting dashboard, and you test them by visiting an old link to confirm it lands on the right new page.
At TopDevs we map old URLs to new ones before any launch, so nobody hits a dead page and the SEO value of older pages carries over cleanly.
