We're considering making notable changes to our website's navigation. Other than 301 redirects from old pages to new, what do I need to consider with this type of move or update?

[NetGainTech]

We would like to make some navigation changes to our website: www.NetGainIT.com, specifically to the services section. I know that I will need a list of 301 redirects if I do not plan on keeping certain pages, but what else do I need to consider?

[CleverPhD]

Go through everything on your website navigation, content, XML sitemap and find links to those URLs.  Make sure that your internal links are all updated in addition to having the 301s in place.

Lets say all the old URLs are in the folder /stuff/.  You can setup a spider like Screaming Frog to spider your current site and let you know all the pages that link to internal URLs with /stuff/ in them using the Custom Search Feature.  This will let you know all the pages internally that you need to update the links on.  You can also generate a list of all the /stuff/ pages you link to internally for testing later.

Once you make updates to your site with the links and 301s you can the use the spider to check things 2 ways.  Ideally you would first do this on a development server, test and then go live and test again once you are live.

1. Have the spider go through your site (spider mode) and your XML sitemap and make sure there are no links to /stuff/ and/or that it finds no internal 301s.

2. Have the spider go through the list of old /stuff/ URLs (list mode) and make sure they all 301 to the correct page.

You could go a step further and use OSE (Majestic, ahrefs, etc) or the data from Google Search Console to find external sites that link to your old /stuff/ pages and do two things. 1)  If the link is from an authoritative site ask them to update the link. 2) Cross check all the links to /stuff/ pages to see if there were any that you missed in your internal audit to make sure that those 301 to the correct page.

This all assumes that you are doing a 1 to 1 redirect from your old pages to new pages, i.e. you are keeping the content all the same on the old and the new pages and just updating the URL. If you have any old content that may not have links or are of low quality you may want to consider a content audit and let those 404/410.