Q: Can I just redirect all old URLs to the homepage to be safe?

Q: Can I just redirect all old URLs to the homepage to be safe?

Short answer: please don't — that's the classic migration traffic-killer.

Long answer: I know it feels safe ('at least nobody hits a 404'). But Google treats a mass redirect to the homepage as a 'soft 404' — it sees that /old-blue-widgets has nothing to do with the homepage, decides the old page is effectively gone, and drops its rankings instead of transferring them. You lose exactly the equity you were trying to keep.

The rule: redirect each old URL to its closest matching new URL. Old product page to new product page. Old article to the new version of that article.

What if there's genuinely no equivalent? Then a 410 (gone) or a relevant category page beats the homepage.

Next step: build a 1-to-1 mapping spreadsheet — old URL in column A, best new match in column B. Tedious, yes. It's the single highest-leverage hour of any migration.