Will 301 Redirects Slow Page Speed?

[MJTrevens]

We have a lot of subdomains that we are switching to subfolders and need to 301 redirect all the pages from those subdomains to the new URL. We have over 1000 that need to be implemented.

So, will 301 redirects slow the page speed regardless of which URL the user comes through? Or, as the old urls are dropped from Google's index and bypassed as the new URLs take over in the SERPs, will those redirects then have no effect on page speed?

Trying to find a clear answer to this and have yet to find a good answer

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey Corp Analytics!

In short...

If you can avoid redirects you will certainly be serving your content faster.

Google recommends avoiding them where possible: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile

"Have you ever asked where a bathroom is and when you go there you are told that this bathroom is closed and you have to go to some other bathroom? It is like that. Redirects cause your pages to load slower because it is a waste of time to go to one place just to be redirected to another."

Makes sense, right?

Here another great article on the topic and the source of that quote: https://varvy.com/pagespeed/minimize-redirects.html

Hope that helps!!

[nhhernandez]

Hi, like what Bryan said, it's better if you could avoid having redirects. Because of the extra step, redirects can affect your PageSpeed. We've always used redirects however - it's difficult to avoid - and it's very rarely flagged as a major issue when running the site in Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. The one thing we found that really has an impact on PageSpeed is a redirect chain, which should be avoided. This happens when a redirect goes to another redirect. Example: non-www redirected to a www version of the site, and then later on redirected again to an https www version. PageSpeed sites flag this as an issue, and so does Moz.

Hope this helps!

[Bryan_Loconto]

Yes Nikki, great addition about avoiding redirect chains! Redirects are useful and difficult to avoid in most cases but redirecting to a redirect should always be avoided for the sake of Page Speed and common sense Cheers!!