Why Changing Your Website URLs Is Riskier Than You Think
Why Changing Your Website URLs Is Riskier Than You Think
You finally decided to clean up your website. Maybe your old URLs look messy, your page names have changed, or you're reorganizing your site structure. So you pop into the backend, update a few slugs, and feel good about the fresh start.
Then your SEO tanks. Inquiries slow down. And you have no idea why.
Changing your page URLs without setting up a redirect is one of the fastest ways to quietly destroy rankings you've spent months (or years) building. And the frustrating part? You won't always notice it right away.
Here's what's actually happening behind the scenes, and what you need to do if a URL change is unavoidable.
What a Page URL Actually Does (Beyond Just Looking Pretty)
Your URL isn't just an address. It's a signal.
Search engines like Google use your URL to understand what a page is about, how your site is organized, and how authoritative that specific page is. Every time someone links to your page, shares it on social media, or bookmarks it, they're pointing to that exact URL.
Over time, your page builds up what's called "link equity" — basically, trust and authority that accumulates from all those links and visits. That equity is attached to the URL, not just the content on the page.
Change the URL, and you essentially wipe the slate clean. Google sees the old URL as gone and the new URL as brand new, with zero history.
What Actually Happens When You Change a URL Without a Redirect
Quick Answer: Google drops the old page from search results, anyone who clicks an old link gets a "404 page not found" error, and your new page has to start building authority from scratch. This can take months to recover from.
Here's the full picture:
You lose your search rankings. If your old URL was ranking on page one for a keyword your clients are searching, that ranking disappears. Your new URL starts at zero.
Old links break. Anyone who has your old URL bookmarked, saved in an email, or linked to from their own website hits a dead end. That's a bad experience — and it signals to Google that something's wrong.
You lose referral traffic. If anyone has ever linked to your page (another website, a social post, a directory listing), those links now go nowhere.
Your credibility takes a hit. Nothing makes a business look less trustworthy than a broken link. Potential clients who click through and get a 404 error aren't going to dig around to find the new page. They're gone.
When Changing a URL Is Actually Worth It
Most of the time, the answer is: don't change it.
If your page is already ranking, getting traffic, or has been shared or linked to anywhere, the risk almost always outweighs the benefit of having a "cleaner" URL.
But there are situations where a URL change makes sense:
The old URL is actively hurting you. If your URL includes outdated information, a brand name you no longer use, or something that could confuse visitors, changing it might be worth the temporary dip.
You're doing a full rebrand or site rebuild. Starting fresh sometimes means restructuring everything. When you're doing a full overhaul anyway, cleaning up your URL structure at the same time is smart — as long as you set up redirects.
Your URL structure is technically broken. Duplicate URLs, URLs with weird characters, or pages that have indexed under the wrong slug are worth fixing.
You're correcting a genuine SEO mistake. Sometimes URLs were set up wrong from the start — keyword stuffed, way too long, or completely unrelated to the content. A strategic correction with proper redirects can pay off.
What a Redirect Does (and Why It Fixes Everything)
A redirect tells search engines and browsers: "This page moved. Go here instead."
When you set up what's called a 301 redirect (the technical term for a permanent redirect), a few things happen:
Anyone who visits the old URL gets automatically sent to the new one
Google transfers the link equity from the old URL to the new URL
Old bookmarks and links still work
Your rankings have a much better chance of recovering
It's not a perfect solution — some ranking dip is still possible — but it dramatically reduces the damage. Without a redirect, you're starting completely from scratch. With one, you're keeping most of what you built.
How to Set Up a URL Redirect in Squarespace
If you're on Squarespace, setting up a redirect is more approachable than it sounds — but the formatting has to be exact or it won't work.
We put together a full step-by-step walkthrough, including the difference between 301 and 302 redirects, common mistakes that trip people up, and how to use patterns to redirect entire sections of your site at once: Fix Broken Links: Squarespace Redirect Setup Guide
The short version: go to Settings → Developer Tools → URL Mappings and add a line for each redirect in this format:
/old-page-url -> /new-page-url 301
But read the full guide before you dive in. The most common mistakes — redirect chains, incorrect formatting, forgetting to delete the old page first — are easy to avoid when you know what to look for.
Tell Google About the Change in Search Console
Setting up a redirect handles the user experience side of things. But there's one more step that speeds up the SEO recovery: telling Google directly.
When you change a URL, Google will eventually find the redirect on its own — but "eventually" can mean days or weeks. During that window, your old URL might still be indexed, your new URL hasn't been crawled yet, and your rankings are in limbo.
Submitting your new URL to Google Search Console pushes Google to crawl and index it faster, which shortens that recovery window significantly.
Here's how to do it: go to Google Search Console, paste your new URL into the search bar at the top, and click Request Indexing. That's it. Google adds it to the crawl queue, usually within a few days.
A couple of things worth knowing: this isn't a guarantee of immediate indexing, and it doesn't override the redirect — the redirect still needs to be in place. Think of it as a nudge rather than a magic fix. But it's a two-minute step that can meaningfully speed up how quickly your new URL starts picking up where the old one left off.
If you're making several URL changes at once, you can also submit an updated XML sitemap through Search Console, which prompts Google to recrawl your entire site structure. That's the more thorough option when you're doing a bigger restructure.
The URLs You're Most Likely to Accidentally Break
Most small business owners don't realize how many URLs are actually in play on their site. It's not just your main pages.
Blog posts. If you've been blogging and decide to restructure your blog or rename posts, every single post URL needs a redirect.
Portfolio or case study pages. These often get linked to from other sites or shared directly with potential clients.
Old service pages. If you've rebranded a service or split one service into multiple offerings, those old URLs are probably still out there somewhere.
Thank you pages and landing pages. If you've run any ads or email campaigns that linked to specific pages, those URLs might still be getting traffic.
Your homepage URL isn't the only URL that matters. This is the most common misconception. Small changes across the site add up fast.
The Honest Bottom Line
If your URL isn't broken, don't fix it.
The desire for a clean, organized URL structure makes sense — but unless something is genuinely wrong, the risk of losing rankings and traffic isn't worth a cosmetic improvement. Your URL doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to work and stay consistent.
If you do need to make URL changes, set up your redirects before anything else. Not after. Not "when you get around to it." Before.
And if you're planning a full site redesign or restructure and aren't sure which URLs are worth keeping, what's currently ranking, or how to handle redirects without breaking something else — that's exactly what our ongoing SEO and website maintenance retainers cover.
Part of what we do every month for clients is monitor for broken links, flag any ranking drops that could point to a URL issue, and handle the behind-the-scenes maintenance that most business owners don't have time to keep up with. Your website doesn't stop needing attention after it launches, and URL management is one of those things that quietly causes problems when nobody's watching it.
If you want someone keeping an eye on all of it so you don't have to, let's talk about what that looks like for your business.
Want to go deeper on the technical side? Read Fix Broken Links: Squarespace Redirect Setup Guide for a full walkthrough.
