Keep them for at least a year. Google’s own page on moving a site says to keep redirects “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”, and there is no prize for switching them off on the anniversary. On most hosting a redirect costs nothing to leave running, so the honest answer is to leave them up and stop thinking about it.
What Google actually says
The document to read is the Google Search Central page headed “How to move a site”, the one the docs file under moving a site with URL changes. On the redirect step it says: “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” It gives a reason. That window lets Google move all the signals across, including recrawling your old addresses and reassigning the links on other sites that point at them. The page was last updated 2026-06-17.
The same paragraph goes further than the year. It says that from the point of view of the people using your site, you should consider keeping redirects indefinitely. A year is the floor, not the target.
The page is also clear that a year is not how long the move itself takes. It says a small to medium sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and that larger sites take longer. It also says visibility in search can move around while that happens, and that this is normal.
So the year is not really about Google. It is about everyone else who wrote your old address down.
Where the 180 days comes from
You will see 180 days quoted all over the place. It comes from a different Google page, the Change of Address tool page in Search Console Help. That page says to maintain the redirects for at least 180 days, and longer if you still see any traffic to them from Google Search.
The same page says the tool’s actions continue for 180 days after you start the migration in Search Console, and that after that period Google does not recognize any relationship between the old site and the new one. It treats the old site as unrelated if it is still up and crawlable. That page carries no update date.
So 180 days is the life of the tool, not the life of your redirects. Two Google pages, two numbers. Take the bigger one, from the page that is actually about moving a site. Whether you need that tool at all is a separate question, and it is covered in the piece on the Change of Address tool.
Bing puts the number higher
Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Blog published a migration guide on December 17, 2020. It says the redirects on the old domain need to remain live for at least 1 to 2 years, and preferably longer. The same post says server log files must be monitored daily for at least three months once the move has started.
Be careful with that one. It is nearly six years old, and the blog labels it a guest post from an outside consultant rather than Bing’s own help documentation. Treat it as a second opinion. It points the same direction as Google, which is: longer than you would guess.
Here is the limit in all of this. Google’s separate page “Redirects and Google Search”, last updated 2026-04-14, never says how long to keep one. It only tells you to pick the kind of redirect that matches how long you expect it to stay in place. Nobody publishes what happens the day after you turn a redirect off. A year is advice from the people who run the crawler, not a measured result. Anyone who tells you exactly what you lose on day 366 is guessing.
The real test is whether anyone still uses the old address
Google’s own wording hands you the test. Keep them longer if you still see any traffic. So go and look.
Old addresses live in places you do not control. A supplier’s dealer page. A chamber of commerce listing. A review site. A Facebook post from 2019. A permit office page nobody has edited in years. A truck wrap, a yard sign, and an old flyer in somebody’s kitchen drawer. None of that updates itself when your new site goes live.
The site move page also says redirects are slow for users, and that you should update your own links, plus any high volume links from other websites, so they point straight at the new addresses. That is worth the phone calls. Every link that gets fixed is one less thing riding on your redirect file. The links you cannot get fixed are exactly why the file stays.
Checking which old addresses still pull clicks is a monthly habit, not a launch day task. It sits inside the ongoing search checks, alongside everything else worth watching month to month.
What keeping them costs you
On most hosting a redirect is one line in a text file. It does not slow the site down for people who arrive at the correct address, and it does not carry a monthly fee. If a quote has a recurring line item for keeping a redirect list alive on a small site, ask what the monthly work actually is, since a monthly report should name every page it touched.
One thing does cost real money. The old domain has to stay renewed, or the old addresses stop resolving and there is nothing left to redirect. The Change of Address page recommends paying for the old domain for at least a year after the move anyway, so nobody else can pick up the name you walked away from and use it badly. If the old site is also sitting on paid hosting only to serve redirects, that bill is worth cutting down.
Here is where you should not spend. If a page had no links pointing at it, no traffic, and never showed up in search, a redirect for it buys you nothing. You do not need to pay anyone to hand build a redirect list hundreds of lines long for pages nobody ever opened. Pull the addresses that actually got clicks in the last year, cover those properly, and send the rest to the closest page that makes sense.
One more thing, about testing. RFC 9110, the IETF document that defines HTTP, published in June 2022, says a permanent redirect can be stored by a cache and handed out again later, even when nothing told the cache how long to keep it. Your own browser is one of those caches. It can keep sending you to the right page after the redirect is gone from the server. Test old addresses in a private window, or on a phone that has never visited the site, or you will believe something works when it no longer does.
What to do next
- Put the launch date on a calendar and mark one year out. Nothing gets deleted before that mark.
- Once a month for the first three months, open Search Console and look for clicks still landing on old addresses. Which of those old addresses are worth chasing is sorted out in the piece on 404s after a move.
- Email the ten sites that link to you most and ask them to update the address. Start with the ones that send you real people.
- At the one year mark, do not delete. Check again. If a single old address still gets a click, keep going.
- Keep the redirect list as a plain text file you own, old address and new address on each line. If the site ever moves again, that file is where the next move starts.
If someone is building your new site right now, every old address should already point somewhere on the day the new site goes live, not in a cleanup ticket after the traffic dips. That belongs in the website build itself. Redirects are the cheapest part of the whole move, and the last part to be in a hurry to switch off.