How to Set Up 301 Redirects in Webflow (Without Breaking SEO)

Redirects are the most important thing you'll do during a site migration and the most dangerous thing to get wrong. A missed redirect on a high-traffic URL transfers no link equity and sends users to a 404. A 302 instead of a 301 on a permanent URL change tells Google the old URL is still the real one.

Webflow supports 301 redirects with basic wildcard matching. Here's where to find the interface, how to use it, and how to verify your redirects actually work.

Where Redirects Live in Webflow

The redirect manager is not in the Designer. It's in:

Site Settings → Publishing → Redirects

You get there by clicking the site name in the top-left of the Designer, which opens the Site Settings panel in your browser. Then navigate to the Publishing tab. Scroll down to find the Redirects section.

The interface has two fields: Old Path and New Path. Enter paths without the domain — just the path starting with /.

Example:

• Old Path: /blog/old-post-title
• New Path: /blog/new-post-title

All redirects added here are treated as 301 (permanent) redirects by Webflow. There is no option to create a 302 (temporary) redirect through this interface. If you need a temporary redirect for a specific purpose, you'd need to handle it outside Webflow (Cloudflare, a proxy layer, etc.) — but for most site owners, 301 is what you want for URL changes.

The Wildcard Syntax

Webflow supports a basic wildcard: an asterisk (*) at the end of the Old Path that matches any path starting with that prefix.

Syntax:

The * in the New Path refers to whatever matched the * in the Old Path. So /old-blog/my-post → /blog/my-post.

Wildcard precedence: Exact-match redirects take priority over wildcard redirects. If you have a wildcard for /blog/* and an exact match for /blog/about, the exact match wins.

Bulk Import via CSV

Adding redirects one by one is impractical for a large site migration. Webflow supports CSV import. The format is two columns, no header row:

/old-path-1,/new-path-1
/old-path-2,/new-path-2
/old-path-3,/new-path-3

Click the "Import CSV" button in the Redirects section. After import, Webflow shows you a preview before applying — review it for any rows that look wrong before confirming.

Preparing your CSV for a migration:

1. Export your old sitemap as a list of URLs
2. Map each old URL to its new equivalent
3. Strip the domain — keep only the path starting with /
4. Save as a plain CSV (no BOM, UTF-8 encoding)
5. Import and verify the count matches what you expect

If you have existing redirects in Webflow and import a new CSV, the new redirects are added to the existing ones. They don't replace them. If you want to clean out old redirects, you'll need to delete them manually first or use the "Delete all" option if available.

Common Redirect Patterns

Post-redesign URL restructuring:

Old site used /blog/post-title, new site uses /posts/post-title.

Old Path: /blog/*
New Path: /posts/*

One wildcard rule covers the entire section.

Removing a date from blog URLs:

Old: /blog/2023/04/my-post New: /blog/my-post

This can't be handled with a single wildcard because the path structure changes non-uniformly. You need individual redirects for each post, or a proxy-layer rule that strips the date segment.

Consolidating duplicate pages:

If you have /services/ and /our-services/ both indexed, pick one and redirect the other:

Old Path: /our-services
New Path: /services

Don't forget the trailing slash variant if both /our-services and /our-services/ exist.

Language/locale removal:

Old site had /en/ prefix, new site drops it:

Old Path: /en/*
New Path: /*

301 vs 302: When to Use Which

301 = Permanent. Use when the URL has moved and you don't expect to use the old URL again. This passes link equity (approximately 99% of PageRank) to the new URL. Google will eventually drop the old URL from its index and index the new one.

302 = Temporary. Use when the redirect is intentionally short-term — A/B test redirects, maintenance redirects, seasonal redirects. Google keeps the old URL indexed and doesn't pass full link equity.

The most common mistake is using 302 for permanent URL changes. If you changed a blog post slug, that's a 301. If you're redirecting traffic during a 2-hour maintenance window, that's a 302.

Since Webflow only supports 301 through its UI, this decision is largely made for you. If you need a 302, you'll need an external proxy.

Verifying Your Redirects with curl

Before and after publishing a redirect, verify it from the command line. Don't rely on browser behavior — browsers cache redirects aggressively.

curl -I https://yourdomain.com/old-path

Look for:

• HTTP/2 301 — correct, permanent redirect
• Location: https://yourdomain.com/new-path — the destination URL

If you see HTTP/2 200 instead of 301, the redirect isn't firing. If you see HTTP/2 302, something in your stack is converting it to a temporary redirect.

For a full redirect chain check (useful when debugging chains of multiple redirects):

curl -IL https://yourdomain.com/old-path

The -L flag follows redirects, and you'll see the status code and Location for each hop. A chain longer than 2 hops (old URL → intermediate → final) creates unnecessary crawl delay and dilutes link equity. Redirect directly to the final destination wherever possible.

After the Migration

Once your redirects are in place:

1. Run a crawl of your old sitemap URLs to confirm all return 301s
2. Submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console
3. Use Search Console's URL Inspection tool to request indexing on your most important new URLs
4. Monitor 404 errors in Search Console's Pages report — they'll surface any URLs you missed
5. Check your old URLs in 2–4 weeks and confirm Google has updated its index to the new URLs

Redirects don't preserve rankings instantly. Depending on crawl frequency and how many links point to the old URLs, it can take weeks for Google to fully transfer the equity and update its index. High-authority pages on high-traffic sites move faster than thin pages on low-traffic sites.

The SEO for Webflow guide covers the other technical foundations: sitemap, robots.txt, meta tags, and image optimization. If you've just finished a migration, work through the full SEO checklist to make sure nothing else is broken.