Update:

02 June 2025 – Removing idle redirects (No impact)
05 June 2025 – Removing expired URL that was once hosted on CMS, such as www.reading.ac.uk/henley as it’s now www.henley.ac.uk.
12 June 2025 – Remove the direct 1-2-1 redirects for News and Staff News from the old CMS to the archive. Instead, users would be redirected to the main landing page.

Over the next few months, DTS will be removing outdated and broken redirects:

Here’s what we’re doing:

  • Removing short URLs – These are memorable links often created for specific campaigns (e.g. www.reading.ac.uk/xyz) that no longer work (page not found) or point to useful content.
  • Removing broken redirects: These were originally set up to send users from an old page to a new one usually as a result of a name change.
  • Retiring redirects from the old CMS – Some redirects were created when we moved from our previous CMS (ActiveEdition) to our Sitecore that are no longer needed.

 

Over the years, the number of redirects has grown significantly, with tens of thousands now in place. When there are too many redirects, especially those that are broken or go through several steps, this can contribute to slower page load times. This effect may be more noticeable for users accessing the site from overseas, where additional network latency can compound delays. In some cases, complex redirect chains might even prevent pages from loading correctly.

Cleaning up these old redirects is a necessary step toward modernising our web infrastructure and improving the experience for all users.

Check your links in all your digital content (e.g., email signatures, presentations, documents, PDFs as well as webpages). Follow them to see where they go and that they match the written URL rather than redirecting. You can recognise old redirects as the majority have a .aspx on the end of the URL.

We are splitting this exercise into phases and will keep this post updated as the work progresses.

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