Glossary Entry
What is 301 Redirect?
301 Redirect without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
A 301 redirect forwards one URL to another permanently, taking visitors across and passing search-ranking signals to the destination.
The rest of the page opens it up — the mechanics, why a site owner should care, and one concrete example of it at work.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
100+
Terms in the jargon buster
2 min
Average read time
Plain
English throughout
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People, if you get stuck
It is what makes a clean migration possible, whether a new domain, a move to HTTPS or a restructured site, and mapping page to page preserves the deep-link value a blanket redirect to the homepage throws away.
The 302, its temporary counterpart, withholds that signal transfer on purpose. Choosing between the two tells search engines precisely how permanent you consider the move.
A way to picture 301 Redirect
A flight corridor rerouted for good. Traffic takes the new path automatically, and over the following months every chart is redrawn, which happens only because the change was filed as permanent rather than provisional.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Why this term earns a page
Redirect discipline separates a migration that keeps years of accumulated search equity from one that starts again at nothing. Treat old redirects as permanent infrastructure, since their useful life runs into decades, rather than as scaffolding to clear once launch week is over.
That, incidentally, is the bar for any technical term — not 'could I lecture on it' but 'would I recognise it as the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now would.
One worked example
Merging two overlapping articles, an editor 301s the weaker URL onto the stronger. Within weeks the links and rankings that were divided between them have gathered on the surviving page.
Scale that example across every website online and you have described the whole job of the concept in one stroke.
How Hosting & Domains deals with it
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are HTTP Status Codes, 404 Error, .htaccess and Domain Name.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the name's registration is on us.
A jargon buster from the people who answer the tickets
Sooner or later every confusing hosting term turns into a support ticket, so we defined the hundred commonest ones properly — once, in the same plain English we use with customers.
Hosted somewhere else already? We move the whole site at no charge, usually within 24 hours, and it goes on answering visitors throughout.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
This term, properly landed
301 Redirect defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Clear about how deep to go
Most of these are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and every entry says which it is.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Nothing teaches a hosting term faster than finding it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
Look at how your account has it configured. Nine times in ten the default is right, and a check turns the guess into certainty.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — HTTP Status Codes, 404 Error and .htaccess finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- LiteSpeed caching in the server itself rather than bolted on by plugin
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- Staging copies for trying a change before it goes live
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
How fast do search engines act on a 301?
Crawlers pick it up quickly, while the signals themselves take several weeks to settle on the new address. Keep the redirect permanently in place either way, because links on other people's sites never fully get updated and that legacy traffic keeps converting for years.
Do redirect chains do real harm?
They do. Every hop adds latency and dilutes the signal, so A to B to C should be flattened until A points straight at C. Chains accumulate on any site with several migrations behind it, and an annual audit returns that hour many times over.
Is the free SSL certificate genuinely free?
Entirely, on every plan. The certificate is issued as soon as the name points here and reissues itself well before it lapses. On encryption it matches any paid DV certificate — the paid options exist for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Where does the hardware physically sit?
The platform runs from a London datacentre with redundant power, cooling and several upstream carriers, with server-level caching in front that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites how the platform is built — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, restrained account density per machine — counts for far more than where it sits.
Keep reading
Domain Name
A domain name is the readable address of a website, the memorable text DNS converts into the numbers machin…
.htaccess
.htaccess is the per-directory configuration file Apache reads on every request, and it is your lever for r…
How to Set Up 301 Redirects
A walkthrough to follow with the panel open in the next tab.
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