How to Retire Old Subdomains: Redirect Strategy for Legacy Blog, Help, and Campaign Hosts

Old subdomains rarely disappear cleanly on their own

Legacy blog, help, promo, or regional subdomains often survive through migrations because no team wants to break the traffic still flowing into them.

The common mistake

Teams redirect the whole subdomain to the root domain without checking which sections still receive backlinks, bookmarks, or search traffic.

Practical approach

Inventory the subdomain by host and path, identify the pages that still matter, and route them to the closest current destinations. Use host-level redirects only after you understand the real path-level value still attached to the old subdomain.