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CMSRedirectsAudit

The Redirect Audit You Should Run Right After a CMS Launch

March 20, 20267 min

Launch day is only the beginning

A CMS launch can look fine on the homepage and still ship broken redirect behavior across templates, archives, author pages, and old slug patterns.

What to audit first

  • —old URLs from top landing pages and backlink reports
  • —pagination, tag, and category routes
  • —language, www, and protocol normalization
  • —draft, preview, and legacy paths that should not stay crawlable

Common post-launch surprises

You find 302s where 301s were expected, homepage redirects replacing specific mappings, and chains created by app rules plus CDN rules plus CMS plugins.

Better workflow

Run a redirect audit within hours of launch, not weeks later. The sooner you catch template-level mistakes, the fewer backlinks, crawl logs, and rankings you burn through.