When moving my ecommerce website from one host to another should I also 301 all my image urls?

[Hyrule]

I'm going to be 301'ing a lot of pages, but should i also 301 my image URLS? Any other helpful hints would be awesome too, as this will be my first move online ever. We've been with our host 3 years.

Thanks!

Paul Serra

STbands.com, Owner

[G-Force]

Hi Paul,

When you say that you willl change "host", do you mean web hosting provider, domain name or ecommerce platform? If you meant :

Hosting provider : you shouldn't have to do any 301 redirect as all the Urls will remain the same, only the IP adress of the website will change, but this is not a big deal.

Domain name : If you have a apache server, you could create a .htaccess with single line of code that will redirect any pages or images on the old domain to the new one, without having to create a single 301 for every file.

Ecommerce platform : This one is the hardest one.  If you are to switch to a new ecommerce platform, I suggest you try to keep as much as possible the same Url structure as you had if possible as it already looks good.

Depending on the type of move you do, please specify the kind of change you will be doing so we can help you better.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[Hyrule]

Guillaume,

Thanks for the answer. I am basically moving ecommerce platforms to answer your question. I am keep the same domain (www.stbands.com). If you want to get even more specific i am moving from storesonline to corecommerce. Here's some more info:

• All meta tags, URLS, content is virtually going to be the same except my product pages and normal pages will end with .html, however my category pages will still be /categoryname (like a directory).
• My category URLS seem to build in a mod re-write fashion, which I hear is better for SEO (like /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/).
• I have set all my pages to use the rel=cananical tag, so if you are on the category  /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/  it cananicals back to /head-sweatbands
• The images are changing names as I upload them on a product because it auto creates new sizes. This differs from our old host and may affect our vertical image rankings. Should I 301 the image URLS?
• I am keeping the www. in my domain name, as opposed to just domain.com to keep everything the same.
• CoreCommerce automatically seems to make my products uppercase in the URL as they are in the title, but the url works both lowercase and uppercase so its not case sensitive.

This is just an overview of some things I think I have most of my bases covered, but i'm aiming for a april 1st launch / move for the new site. Any other pointers / suggestions?

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Paul,

We're going through and following up with older questions that are still marked unanswered. Do you have any questions still? Can you share what you did, and any lessons learned so we can have them for the archives for the next time someone's in a similar situation?

Thanks!

[tylerfraser]

Excellent question. I wouldn't worry about redirecting images, but you can: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3778347/is-it-ok-to-http-redirect-images

[BenRWoodard]

I would love to hear what decision you went with and how it turned out in the data.  I moved a large ecommerce site at the beginning of the year and didn't touch any image url's and they never showed up in 404 errors either.  I'm guessing the links to our site were not to product images but rather to product pages.

Even though I did it this way, I would love to hear how your's came out.

Thanks!

[onwebtoday]

Hi Paul,

301'ing old urls to new urls is enough. Additionally you can add a custom 404 page for the other old urls which may be created becuase of tags, categories etc.