Limits to 301 in htaccess?

[AdoptionHelp]

I'm about to launch a redesign of my company's main website, and we've updated most of the URLs to be more user friendly and SEO optimized. I've just finished editing my spreadsheet, and see that I'll need to implement 244 redirects.

My question is: Are there performance issues with loading your .htaccess file up with almost 250 301 redirect commands? I've heard a bloated htaccess file can really slow down apache, should I be approaching this a different way, maybe with php?

[Vahe.Arabian]

Ryan,

htaccess is the best way to go. The truth is it could potentially slow down your site due to the many server requests applicable. 250 is not too bad. However there are alternatives you can consider for speeding up your site.

(1) If your site has other aspects which are slowing down the site, why not improve on those elemtn

(2) Host your sites assets on a CDN, makes your site alot faster.

(3) If your old pages have very low authority use regex and redirect them to the relevant category page, rather than mapping them to the alternative new page. I wouldn't recommend this unless you really have time restrictions.

Make sure you however update the broken links for the old page to the relevant new page for both internal linking & external linking purposes.

Hope this helps.

[SamAllen]

I agree with this response.

250 redirects is a modest number. I have sites with 1000's that have no problems.

[JarnoNijzing]

Ryan,

as long as you don't use more then 1 redirect per page not one browser will coze problems.

I had a problem with htaccess once beceause i redirected more then 1 variation of a page to the same new page and that generated errors in Safari, Mozilla and Chrome but not IE 8.x..

You should be fine for now.