Indefinitely for anything that carried real search visibility or external inbound links — removing a redirect once traffic has moved on rarely saves anything meaningful and risks breaking an old link someone still uses.
A redirect rule costs essentially nothing to maintain once implemented. The common instinct to “clean up” old redirects after a year or two trades a negligible saving for a real risk: an old external link, a bookmark, or a printed reference still pointing to the original URL suddenly breaking.
Only when you can confirm, through analytics and backlink data, that a URL has had zero traffic and zero external links for a sustained period, and even then the case for removing it is weak. Removing at scale during a platform cleanup is different from removing individually.
Redirect management is core to protecting visibility through any platform change — see SEO migration for how we handle mapping and preservation during a move.
Keeping old redirects in place has a negligible performance cost when implemented properly, so the number of active rules is rarely a meaningful factor at normal site scale. The real cost of redirects comes from poor organisation or chains, not from simply retaining a rule for a URL that still receives occasional traffic or backlinks.
Redirect chains, where a URL redirects through several intermediate steps before reaching its destination, are worth cleaning up. Each should be flattened to a single direct redirect to the final page, which is a different task from removing the redirect altogether and one that noticeably helps both crawl efficiency and page speed.
Legacy PDFs need their own redirect handling, since they are often linked directly from external sites, bookmarks, printed materials and third-party references in ways that standard page-level redirects do not reliably capture. See how to redirect legacy PDF URLs for the specific approach that keeps those file links working correctly.
A redirect can be removed once external traffic and backlinks to the old URL have stopped, which is best confirmed through several months of analytics data rather than assumed. Removing one too early risks breaking a link from an external site, a bookmark, or another page on your own site that was never updated.
Tell us what you are considering removing and we will tell you what the actual risk looks like.