Q: We forgot to redirect image URLs in a migration — did that really matter?

Q: We forgot to redirect image URLs in a migration — did that really matter?

Underrated question, and the answer surprises people.

Short answer: it cost real traffic if image search mattered to you.

Long answer: a recipe site moved domains, redirected pages perfectly, but image files (/wp-content/uploads/...) returned 404 on the old domain with no redirect. Google Images had indexed thousands of them. Image-search traffic — about 19% of their total — collapsed 70% over a month while page traffic was fine.

We added 301s for the image directory to the new paths and resubmitted the image sitemap. Image traffic clawed back to ~85% of prior over 7 weeks; it's slower because image reindexing lags.

Next step: if image search sends you meaningful traffic, redirect /uploads/ and your CDN paths too — not just HTML pages.