Long term plan for a large htaccess file with 301 redirects

[gavinhoman]

We setup a pretty large htaccess file in February for a site that involved over 2,000 lines of 301 redirects from old product url's to new ones.

The 'old urls' still get a lot of traffic from product review sites and other pretty good sites which we can't change.

We are now trying to reduce the page load times and we're ticking all of the boxes apart from the size of the htaccess file which seems to be causing a considerable hang on load times. The file is currently 410kb big!

My question is, what should I do in terms of a long terms strategy and has anyone came across a similar problem?

At the moment I am inclined to now remove the 2,000 lines of individual redirects and put in a 'catch all' whereby anything from the old site will go to the new site homepage.

Example code:

RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Womens_Ear_Muffs.html /manbi-ear-muffs.html
RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Wrist_Guards.html /manbi-wrist-guards.html

There is no consistency between the old urls and the new ones apart from they all sit in the subfolder /acatalog/

[HandsomeWeb]

When I faced a situation with several hundred pages, I decided to to only list the most important ones.  I determined the important ones by there presence in Google and the import of the page content.

I first Googled "site:www.example.com" to get a good idea of what was indexed.

I used Analytics to see if any pages were entry pages.  If a page gets no hits as an entry page, the 301 redirect is never needed.

I made a list of about 100 redirects, then made the 404 error page a slight variation of my homepage.

Now if you have any pages that have links in, you will need to maintain those redirects.