Redirects and Site Migrations

Correctly redirecting your URLs is one of the most important tasks to ensure a successful site migration. During your site migration, you might haven taken the opportunity to re-organize the structure of your site, which might have changed where some pages are located or how they’re named.

For example, let’s say your site is located at yalesites.yale.edu and you had a page where all of your live trainings were hosted and the URL was yalesites.yale.edu/live-training.

In the new site you’re migrating to, you decide to rename that page as “Community Trainings” and it changes the URL to yalesites.yale.edu/community-trainings.

If yalesites.yale.edu/live-training was a page that people frequently visited, had bookmarked, or you just want people to know what the new location of that page is, you’ll want to make sure you enable a redirect from yalesites.yale.edu/live-training to yalesites.yale.edu/community-trainings.

Adding Redirects

To add redirects, you need to be logged into your site and have the “Site administrator” role assigned to you.

Once logged in, navigate to the administration menu, hover over (or click on) “Settings”, and then click on “Redirects”.

Screenshot of the administration toolbar, where the Settings menu item has been expanded. — Find redirect settings in the administrative menu under Settings

Select “+ Add redirect”

Screenshot of the Redirects settings page — The redirect manage page will show all your redirects setup up on your YaleSite

In the “Path” field, add the path of the URL that you want to be redirected. For example, if you wanted to redirect yalesites.yale.edu/live-training, you would enter live-training into the path field.

In the “To” field, you have a few options for entering the destination that you want the URL to be redirected to. The recommended option is typing the title of the piece of content:

You can start typing the title of a piece of content to select it.

Screenshot of the Add URL redirect settings page — Fill out the path field with the new URL you want your users to be redirected from

You can enter an internal path such as /node/node-number. The node number is the unique ID of a page in your site.
- In this example, the node number of the “Community Trainings” page is “14”. In addition to the URL of that page being yalesites.yale.edu/community-trainings, it can also be found at yalesites.yale.edu/node/14

Screenshot of the Add URL redirect settings page, using the node path option — You can fill out the redirect destination as the node number

You can enter the full URL. This option is best for linking to external sites.

Screenshot of the Add URL redirect settings page, using the full URL option — You can fill out the redirect destination as a full URL

Be sure to click “Save.” Once you’ve done that, the redirect will be enabled, and website traffic to the redirected URL will get redirected to the new destination.

Avoid Hotlinking

Hotlinking refers to linking to an asset from another website and using that link for content on a different website or application. For example, linking to a PDF uploaded on the YaleSites website from a page on another website. This essentially puts the onus on the YaleSites website to maintain this file. If for any reason that file is modified or removed, it would break the link on the second website.

When considering your site migration from D7 to the new YaleSites platform, it’s not advisable to hotlink to files uploaded on other sites due to the differences in URL patterns between the old and new platforms. Files uploaded through the WYSIWYG editor on the old platform followed a specific directory pattern that is not replicated on the new YaleSites platform. This discrepancy may cause hotlinked files to become inaccessible over time, particularly when a site is relaunched or transferred to the new platform. It’s also not advisable to create redirects for hotlinking to files on your YaleSite.

It’s recommended to evaluate how these files are being used and consider alternative storage solutions, like Microsoft OneDrive, to maintain persistent, unbroken links. We do not recommend using YaleSites as a public storage for shareable content.