Q: After migration, do I update internal links or just rely on the redirects to handle it?

Q: After migration, do I update internal links or just rely on the redirects to handle it?

Important one — relying on redirects alone is the slow leak nobody notices.

Short answer: update the internal links. Redirects are a safety net, not the plan.

Long answer: if your menus and in-content links still point at old URLs, every internal click fires a redirect hop. That's slower for users, wastes crawl budget on a site full of self-redirects, and leaks a sliver of signal at each hop. Redirects exist to catch external links and bookmarks you can't control — not to excuse leaving your own house wired to dead addresses.

The links in YOUR content are the ones you fully control, so there's no reason to leave them stale.

Next step: crawl your live site and filter "internal URLs that return a 3xx." Update those links to point directly at the final URL. Keep the redirects in place for everything external.