What is a 301 redirect?

A permanent forwarding address. When anything asks for the old page — a browser, a search engine, an assistant — the server answers "that has moved permanently, here is where it lives now" and sends them straight on. The visitor usually does not notice, and search engines move the credit the old address had earned across to the new one.

Will I lose my Google ranking if I change a page's address?

Not if you leave a 301 redirect behind. Google follows it and moves the page's history across. Without one, the old address simply returns a 404 and everything that address had earned goes with it, including the links other people made to it.

Can I just redirect everything to my homepage?

You can, and it is usually a mistake. A redirect to a page that does not answer the same question tends to be treated as a soft 404 and earns you nothing, and the person who wanted your gutter-clearing prices lands on your homepage and leaves. Redirect to the nearest equivalent page, or leave the 404.

How long should I keep a redirect in place?

Indefinitely. They cost nothing to leave in place, and inbound links live for years — a directory entry or a newspaper article from 2019 will still be sending people. There is no benefit to tidying old redirects away.

Can I redirect to a different website?

Not with this. On beam.page a redirect points from one path to another within the same site — both have to be relative paths in the same project, and cross-domain redirects are rejected. Moving to a different domain entirely is a different job, handled at the domain level rather than page by page.

What if the old address still has a page on it?

Then the redirect will not be accepted — a redirect and a page cannot share an address, and the platform tells you which one to remove first. Take the old page down, then add the redirect.

How-to

How to change a page's address without losing your Google traffic

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 6 August 2026 · 7 min read

Rename a page and you don't just move it — you break every link anybody ever made to it. The fix is a 301 redirect: a forwarding address left at the old spot. On a beam.page site that's one sentence, and it's the difference between a tidy-up and a quiet loss of traffic you won't notice for six weeks.

The links you break aren't yours

That's the part worth sitting with. When you change /services-1 to /gutter-clearing, you're not only editing your own site. You're also breaking:

Google's record of that page, and whatever ranking it had built up.
The listing in a trade directory that somebody typed in three years ago.
The link in the local paper's write-up of your business.
A customer's bookmark. Another customer's WhatsApp message to their neighbour.
The QR code on five hundred leaflets in a box in your garage.

You can fix the links on your own site in an afternoon. You cannot fix any of those. The redirect is how you fix them all at once, without asking anybody for anything.

What a 301 actually does

It's a permanent forwarding address, and it works exactly like the one you leave with the Post Office. Anything that asks for the old page — a browser, Google, an AI assistant — gets told "that's moved permanently, it lives here now" and is sent straight on.

/services-1 → 301 → /gutter-clearing

The visitor usually doesn't notice; they just land on the right page. Google follows it and moves the history the old address had earned across to the new one. That "permanent" bit is what does the work — it's the signal that this isn't a temporary diversion and the index should be updated for good.

When you need one

Situation	What to redirect
Renaming a page	Old address → new address. The common case.
Merging two pages into one	Both old addresses → the combined page.
Tidying up inherited nonsense	/services-1-copy → the real page. Old builders leave a lot of this.
Restructuring into folders	/gutters → /services/gutter-clearing, one per page moved.
Deleting a page that had visitors	→ the nearest page that answers the same question. If there isn't one, see below.

The mistake that makes it useless

Redirecting everything to the homepage. It feels thorough and it achieves close to nothing.

Don't

Twelve deleted pages all pointing at /. Search engines tend to treat a redirect to something that doesn't answer the same question as a soft 404 — the credit doesn't transfer. And the human who searched for your gutter prices arrives at a homepage that doesn't mention gutters and leaves.

Point each old address at the page that most nearly does its job. If nothing does, let it 404 honestly. A clean 404 is a better outcome than a redirect that lies about where the content went.

How to do it, in order

Write the old address down. Exactly.
Do this first. The moment the page is renamed you've lost the only easy record of where all those inbound links are pointing, and "it was something with services in it" won't do.
Build the new page and check it.
New address, working page, before anything at the old address moves. There's no reason to have a gap.
Take the old page down.
This is the step people trip over: a redirect and a page can't both live at the same address. Ask for a redirect while the old page is still sitting there and you'll be told there's a conflict and which one to clear first. Old page goes, then the redirect.
Ask for the redirect.
It's a built-in action, so it really is one sentence — see the prompt below.
Paste the old address into a browser.
You should land on the new page. If you get a 404, it didn't take. Test the actual old address, not one you've typed from memory — that's what step one was for.
Fix your own links, then tell Google.
Update the links on your own site to point straight at the new address rather than bouncing through the redirect, then re-submit your sitemap in Search Console.

The prompt

I want to rename /services-1 to /gutter-clearing.

Build the page at the new address first and show me, then
take the old page down and put a 301 redirect from
/services-1 to /gutter-clearing. Then find every link on
my site that still points at the old address and update it.

That last sentence matters and people forget it. The redirect catches the outside world; your own navigation should point at the new address directly.

Two limits worth knowing

Same site only. A redirect on beam.page goes from one path to another within the same site — both ends have to be relative addresses on your own project, and pointing one at another domain is rejected. That's a sensible guard rather than a gap: moving your whole site to a different domain is a domain-level job, not a page-by-page one.

Chains are allowed, but keep them short. If you rename a page twice, you can redirect A→B and B→C and it'll work. It's still tidier to point A→C directly. Long chains are slow and things get lost in them.

One thing you don't have to do: if you've attached a custom domain, the free .beam.page address you started on redirects to it automatically, path and all. Nobody who bookmarked the old one is stranded.

Fifteen minutes, mostly checking

New page, old page down, redirect, test. The tidy-up you've been putting off because you were told it would cost you your Google ranking — it doesn't, if you leave the forwarding address.

Connect your AI

Questions people ask

How long do I keep the redirect?

Forever. They cost nothing to leave in place, and inbound links live for years — a directory entry from 2019 is still quietly sending people. There's no prize for tidying old redirects away.

How long before Google catches up?

Days to a few weeks, depending on how often it crawls you. Re-submitting the sitemap speeds it along. In the meantime nobody is stranded — the redirect is already working for every real visitor.

Is it worth renaming a page at all?

If the address is genuinely confusing or wrong, yes — a clear address helps people and helps search engines. If it's merely untidy and the page is doing fine, leaving it alone is a perfectly good decision. Not every mess needs fixing.

What about 302 redirects?

A 302 says "temporary", which tells search engines to keep the old address in the index. That's right if the move genuinely is temporary and almost never right for a rename. When in doubt on a rename, you want the 301.

I'm moving off another builder entirely — same thing?

Related, and the priority there is to keep your addresses so you need as few redirects as possible. The migration guide covers it, redirects included.