Thread: 301 Redirect, how many is to many?

I'm working on a site for a client and he wants every page from his old site to have a proper 301 redirect to the new page. Their are a total of 874 pages. I'm wondering, will this many redirects affect his site in a bad way? I'm thinking it might slow down fetching of content but I don't know all that much about this I have used them in the past but never to this extent.

Anyone know for sure?? Thanks...

It can cause a strain on the server, much will depend on the server itself and how many other sites are hosted, etc.

crap, I was afraid youl'd say something like that. He has a few other sites hosted on this server so this isn't going to be fun.

Are you meaning that it will cause issues when someone comes from an old url or do you mean that it would look at this list each and every time a url on this site is hit?

Also, do you have an idea on a soft limit on how many 301s can be on a site before issues? I'm thinking I'll thin out the list to just the main pages but need to know a limit to start with.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I am not the best to answer this I just do know that the bigger an .htaccess file the more server resources it will take to read it each time.

Hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge will be around.