Preserve SEO Using URL Redirects in Square Online
Note: We don’t provide SEO consultation in our Support Centre. For more information on SEO for your specific website’s needs, we recommend consulting an SEO expert.
If you’re migrating a website and domain from another platform to Square using Square Online, 301 redirects preserve your old page URLs by redirecting them to your new ones. Your search engine rank for that page is preserved and you won’t lose traffic (i.e. your SEO stays the same).
Note: This is different from domain forwarding, which helps direct other domains to a primary domain in order to see the same website (regardless of which domain is entered in a web browser). Learn more about domain forwarding in Square Online.
How URL Redirects Work
URL redirects are useful because web hosts use different technologies and codebases. For example, your old website pages might’ve had a totally different file extension (e.g. “.php”, “.html”, etc.) or no file extension at all, and if you ever move your site, you want to make sure your visitors can still access the same content when they visit a particular URL (regardless of where your website is hosted).
Say you had a page called “Contact Us” on your old site and the URL was “mybusiness.com/contact-us.php”. Your new site also has a “Contact Us” page with the new URL “mybusiness.com/contact-us” (i.e. the URL doesn’t end in the file extension “.php” anymore). You can use the URL redirect feature to ensure traffic to that old “/contact-us.php” link is redirected to the new “/contact-us” page.
If your old URLs were more complex, such as “mybusiness.com/site/pages/contact-us.php?form=2”, this shouldn’t be a blocker. Simply enter everything after the “mybusiness.com/” part of the URL (so in the example above, you’d enter “site/pages/contact-us.php?form=2”).
Note: Keep the following points in mind when setting up URL redirects:
At this time, we only support one redirect per page.
There are some URLs that may not work with redirects, such as “mybusiness.com/pages/picture.jpg” or “mybusiness.com/document.pdf”.
URL redirects are only viable if you’re using the same domain name with Square as the one you used with your old host. If you’re using a completely new domain with Square, individual pages on your old site using the old domain can’t be redirected to your new Square Online pages using the new domain.
Set Up a URL Redirect for a Single Page
To set up 301 redirects for individual pages on your Square Online site:
From your Square Dashboard, open up a page of your choice.
Select the gear icon in the editing panel to View page settings.
In the pop-up window’s General tab, enable redirects using the toggle.
Enter the old page URL into the redirect field and select Save.
Publish your site to make the changes live.
Updates with these changes should populate immediately after publishing.
Set Up URL Redirects for Multiple Pages
To set up 301 redirects for multiple pages on your Square Online site:
From your Square Online Overview page, go to Website > SEO.
Under URL Redirects, select Add redirects.
Enter the old page URL in the text box (e.g. ‘contact-us.php’) and select the new page from the dropdown list.
Use the +Add Another link to create more redirects.
Select Save when finished.
Publish your site from the Square Dashboard to see the changes live.
Updates with these changes should populate immediately after publishing.