I have over 12,000 permanent redirects. Is this okay?

[paultg]

Hey guys,

I have moved my website to http://www to https:/www. I use a plugin called Really Simple SSL on Wordpress.

Now I have 12,000 permanent 301 redirects. It seems like my whole site has been moved. Is this the right way to do it?

I am quite new to SEO and I quite don't understand if this is good or bad. From my intuition, it seems like a lot of redirects for Google bot to crawl through. Is there a better way to move to HTTPS without all these redirects?

Thank you.

Paul

[paultg]

Thanks Ryan. Very helpful advice. I restored to my backup and asked my web host to redirect to HTTPS. No more 12,000 redirects!

[erwin33]

Great question. For a move to HTTPS and no other URL syntax changes, you should be able to put a single regular expression redirect in place at the server level rather than a 1 to 1 redirect for every URL to simply change to the secure protocol. Depending on your domain and site hosting provider, that could be done in either of their dashboards.

The downside of having so many redirects will slow page load load and ultimately impact your SEO at some point as each time a page is loaded, the redirects list must be scanned prior to serving the page.  Redirects are a necessary  function but keeping them organized and optimized is key.

I’m happy to continue the conversation if you need any help. WordPress is a great CMS and there are many ways to work through this.

[Verz]

A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested. The three most commonly used redirects are 301, 302, and Meta Refresh.

To understand all the concepts, I advise you to refer to the Moz article. It's helpful and also written in easy language. The author has illustrated all the things in detail with media files & examples.

For the detailed information: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection