Usage 

Open Relaunch Redirects in the backend. In TYPO3 13 it is listed below Site Management, in TYPO3 14 below Sites > Link Management. With several sites, choose the new site at the top.

1. Collect the URLs of the old website 

Use as many sources as you have. Each import adds the URLs that are not on the list yet.

The sitemap of the old website
Usually https://www.example.org/sitemap.xml. Sitemap indexes and gzip compressed sitemaps are followed. The old website has to be online.
The pages report of the Google Search Console
The URLs that actually get traffic, including the ones no sitemap lists. Export the report as CSV or copy its rows.
A crawler or the access logs
Any list with one URL or path per line, or a CSV file. In each row the first cell that looks like a URL or a path is used.

2. Import and check 

Open Import URLs of the old website below the list. Enter the address of the sitemap, or paste the URLs into the text field, and click Import and check.

Import form with a field for the sitemap address and a text field for URLs

Import the sitemap of the old website or paste a list of URLs.

Every URL is checked right away. Large lists of many thousand URLs are faster on the command line, see relaunch-redirects:import.

3. Read the results 

Every old URL gets one of these results:

Result Meaning
Page exists The URL works on the new site as it is.
Redirected A redirect leads to a page, a file or an external URL. Chains of several redirects and temporary redirects (302, 307) are noted, because search engines do not pass the ranking on reliably.
Missing (404) Neither a page nor a redirect: the visitor gets a 404.
Broken redirect A redirect exists, but ends on a hidden or deleted page, on a 404, in a loop or after too many redirects.

The tab Needs a decision lists the missing URLs and the broken redirects. The other tabs show the URLs that already lead somewhere, so you can check where they lead, and the URLs you ignored.

4. Decide 

For each URL that needs a decision, the extension suggests up to three pages of the new site, best first. The score, shown as a percentage, tells how sure the suggestion is:

Score Reason
100 Same path once file extensions and umlauts are normalised: /leistungen/architektur.html and /leistungen/architektur.
90 to 99 The last part of the path exists exactly once on the new site: /unternehmen/team.html and /ueber-uns/team.
70 to 85 The last part of the path exists on several pages. The page with more matching parent folders comes first.
40 to 84 Similar words in the slug, the page title or the navigation title: /jobs.html and the page Karriere with the navigation title Jobs.

Suggestions of 90 and more are ticked. For all others:

  • Pick another suggestion in the list and tick the URL, or
  • enter the ID of the target page. A typed page ID counts as a decision, the tick is not needed. Press Enter or the button below the list.
  • Click Ignore for URLs that should end in a 404, for example old campaign pages or files that are gone for good. Ignored URLs stay on the list and can be shown again.

A broken redirect is fixed by pointing the existing redirect to the chosen page. Redirects with a regular expression may serve other URLs too, so they are not changed automatically: use the edit button to change them by hand.

5. Create the redirects 

Choose the status code (301 by default) and click Create redirects for the ticked URLs. The extension creates one redirect per URL in the TYPO3 redirects module:

  • Source host: the host of the old URL, or all hosts (*) if the list held paths only.
  • Source path: the path of the old URL. Old URLs with a query string get a redirect that respects query parameters.
  • Target: the chosen page in the language of the old URL.
  • Stored on the root page of the site, like the redirects TYPO3 creates when a slug changes, and marked as created manually.

The URLs are checked again right away and move to Redirected.

6. Check again 

Pages and redirects change until the go-live. Click Check again after larger changes, and once more right before the go-live. The command relaunch-redirects:check does the same on the command line and can fail a deployment pipeline when old URLs end in a 404.

Share the list 

Download CSV exports the current view with the result, the final URL, the notes and the best suggestion of every URL, for example for the SEO team or the client. CSV for Excel uses semicolons and a byte order mark, which Excel with German settings expects.