How-to · Intermediate · 20 minutes
How to Set Up 301 Redirects
Move addresses around without losing the visitors or the rankings attached to them — a practical, jargon-free walkthrough with the classic mistake flagged before you make it.
Straight answer first
The job: move addresses around without losing the visitors or the rankings attached to them. Time to allow: 20 minutes. Skill needed: intermediate.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Intermediate
Difficulty level
20 minutes
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and 20 minutes of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
One promise before you start: nothing in this guide is irreversible. Where a step could bite, we say so and give you the undo.
The route, start to finish
Here is the route in full: use 301, not 302, map each page to its replacement, choose one layer and stay there, flatten the chains and keep reading the 404 report.
No stage needs code or a terminal unless the guide says so outright, and where it does, the exact commands are printed. The full step-by-step sits below; the sections around it give the context that makes it stick.
The classic snag
Redirect chains piling up through successive redesigns, each migration adding another hop until an old backlink travels through four of them, shedding speed and signal at every step. Flatten the chains to single hops once a year.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
The shortcut, straight from the support desk
Keep a redirect log: old address, new address, date, reason. Three years on, the mystery rules in .htaccess become unremovable because nobody remembers what breaks without them. That log is your institutional memory.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
How our platform shortens this
We have automated the steps that do not deserve your time: certificates issue and reissue themselves, the installer handles application setup, the daily backup covers the what-if, and per-site settings live in a panel instead of a config file. The guide above covers what remains — the part that is actually about your site.
And when a step misbehaves anyway, support answers at any hour with the actual fix, not a knowledge-base link and a shrug. Half our best guides began life as a pattern in the ticket queue.
Why the job is simpler on our plans
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Bring an existing site and we shift it across at no charge — usually inside 24 hours, with nothing going dark while we work.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
The snag, named early
The classic mistake for this exact job is flagged before step one, so 20 minutes stays 20 minutes.
Scoped honestly
Move addresses around without losing the visitors or the rankings attached to them is a intermediate-level task — this guide budgets 20 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Use 301, not 302
A 301 tells browsers and crawlers the move is permanent and passes the signals along with it. A 302 says the opposite, so keep it for detours that really are temporary.
- 2
Map each page to its replacement
Old address to its exact successor. That mapping preserves the value sitting in deep links; bulk redirects that dump everything on the homepage throw it away.
- 3
Choose one layer and stay there
A redirect plugin for moves inside WordPress, .htaccess rules for site-level and pattern redirects. One mechanism per redirect, cleanly, so nothing ends up fighting.
- 4
Flatten the chains
An A to B to C chain slows visitors down and leaks signal. When B moves to C, go back and repoint the original A rule straight at C.
- 5
Keep reading the 404 report
Search Console and your own logs show which old addresses are still being requested. Every recurring 404 is a redirect you have not written yet.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
How much ranking value survives the move?
Modern consensus says essentially all of it, provided the destination is relevant. The days of automatic redirect decay are behind us. An irrelevant destination — a page pointed at an unrelated homepage — gets treated as a soft 404 instead, so relevance is the condition.
How long do I have to keep them?
Treat them as permanent infrastructure. External links and bookmarks never fully update, and the redirect keeps converting that legacy traffic indefinitely. Remove only the rules whose old addresses genuinely receive no requests, and check the logs before you do.
Which control panel comes with the account?
cPanel, which the whole trade already knows. That means every tutorial online matches what you see, your backups restore onto any cPanel host anywhere, and what you learn here stays useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are stocked on specific plans for anyone who prefers them.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
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Search, register and transfer names — year one free with annual hosting.
Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.
A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Whenever you're ready to order.
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