Consolidating 301 Redirects to Decrease Page Load Times - Major Concerns?

[Owner_Account]

Hello,

I am being pushed to consolidate our over 6k redirects that have accumulated over the course of 4 years. These redirects are one of the many factors causing extensive load times for our website. Many to most or over a year old, have not been used, or simply redirect back to the home page. Other than looking to keep the pages that have external links (also looking for recommendations/tools), are there other best practices from an SEO stand point to ensure there are no major hits to our website.

A little more info, I am looking to pair 6K down by

• Removing all Redirects that have not been used
• Removing all redirects that are over 1 yr+
• Remove all redirects that redirect to simply the home page or a smaller big bucket subfolder
  This should take the number from 6K to around 300.

Are there any major concerns?

Pat

[Andrew-SEO]

How did this go? I'm doing this myself.

The main concern would be loss of backlinks. But otherwise this is a good practice