Many sites that have been around for a while have probably changed their structure over the years. Permalinks with paths that included dates and .HTML used to be all the rage (or maybe that was just the default).

Today, there are some very compelling reasons to remove that extra data from the URLs and simplify the permalinks. Also, there’s that whole switch to HTTPS thing that Google’s been pushing so hard in the last year or so, which also causes your internal URLs to change by adding that extra “s”.

The Problem with Redirects

Whenever your permalink structure changes, you’ll setup (or have setup for you) redirect rules on your server that make sure your old URLs still work.

For example, links to http://best-blog.com/2001/01/myspace-rules.html will automatically redirect to https://best-blog.com/myspace-rules.

As will http://best-blog.com/checkout go to https://best-blog.com/checkout.

But did you know, all of those redirects can slow your server down and negatively impact your site’s page speed?

From Google’s Page Speed Analysis documentation:

(2) Number of redirects should be minimized

Additional HTTP redirects can add one or two extra network roundtrips (two if an extra DNS lookup is required), incurring hundreds of milliseconds of extra latency on 4G networks. For this reason, we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely – this is especially important for the HTML document (avoid “m dot” redirects when possible).