Check broken links after a redesign

The design looks done. Then Search Console fills with 404s, or a client clicks last year’s campaign URL. Redesigns break links in predictable places: menus rebuilt in a new CMS, product slugs renamed, the sitemap still listing the old set, a “redirect everything to /” rule that Google treats as a soft 404.

Order of work

1. Map old → new for URLs that had traffic or backlinks. Direct 301, not a chain through /old then /new. See 301 vs 302.
2. Kill catch-alls to the homepage. If there is no equivalent page, 404 or 410.
3. Rebuild sitemap.xml from the new tree.
4. Scan templates that survived: header, footer, mega-menu, cards. Those hrefs are on every page.
5. Scan a handful of legacy landing URLs the ads still use.

Do this on production, then on the URLs users actually open. Staging vs production is a different pass: staging often has noindex and fake hosts.

Chrome pass

Open the live site, run a page scan on the home and a key template, then a whole-site crawl with a sane page cap. Export CSV for the backlog. Highlighting shows which button still points at /shop-old.

GSC reports what Google already crawled. The first 48 hours after launch, the live DOM is the faster source. Images move too; keep image scanning on for the templates that carry photos.

You will not catch every archived blog comment. You will catch the nav, the sitemap, and the campaign URLs. That is the job.