You 301'd the URLs but never fixed the internal links

You 301'd the URLs but never fixed the internal links
Client migrated, set up clean 301s. Job done, they thought. But every internal link still pointed at the OLD URLs, so every page-to-page click ran through a redirect. Slower crawl, leaked equity, and the site felt sluggish.

The fix:
— crawled the site, found all internal links hitting redirected URLs
— rewrote them to point at the final destination directly
— left the 301s up only for external backlinks

301s are for outside links you can't control. Internal links you CAN control — so make them direct. Never make your own pages hop.

Watch your sitemap too — it should list final URLs, never redirected ones.