Redirect Management and Traffic Routing

When a retailer launches a campaign or replaces its storefront, old product links, saved bookmarks, and paid ads keep driving visitors. Those shoppers need to reach the right page, even while old and new systems run side by side. Broken links waste visits, and redirect chains add delays before shoppers see the offer.

How Harper simplifies redirects and traffic routing

Harper brings redirect rules, data, and request-handling logic together in one application. Teams can import large sets of redirects, prepare campaign changes, and schedule when rules take effect while keeping their existing CDN and storefronts.

The application can send shoppers to a new URL or route requests to the right experience behind the scenes. A redirect sends the shopper to a different web address, while backend routing selects the system that serves the page without changing the address the shopper sees.

Redirects often run alongside page caching, personalization, and experimentation in the same Harper cluster. These capabilities share one regional platform, bringing more of the shopper experience closer to the audience with fewer separate systems to manage.

To reach a new market, add a region to the cluster in Fabric. Select the region, confirm the change, and Fabric handles provisioning, replication, and routing for the combined application. If a Harper region becomes unavailable, traffic moves to healthy regions, helping keep those experiences available.

Alternatively, managing rules in the CDN and web server

Many teams manage redirects in their CDN and use a web server or reverse proxy to send requests to the current or legacy storefront. This works well for straightforward rules. As campaigns, brands, and migrations multiply, updates can spread across CDN settings, server configuration, and application code. Teams have to keep those rules consistent across systems. When redirect lists outgrow existing tools, teams may need to build and maintain a separate service to manage them.

When redirect limits get in the way

A large U.S. omnichannel retailer faced a limit of 5,000 redirect rules per policy in its existing solution. One brand’s redirect list already exceeded 6,000 rules. As products and campaigns changed, the team needed room to keep more old links useful.

Harper moved redirect storage and lookup into a scalable data layer behind the existing CDN, removing that fixed per-policy limit. The approach lets the retailer grow its redirect inventory without splitting it into capped policies.

Why Harper matters

Keep shoppers moving to useful destinations while your team changes campaigns, replaces systems, and reaches new markets.

• Room for more redirects. Grow your redirect inventory without a fixed per-policy rule cap.
• Simpler campaign changes. Prepare redirect batches and schedule activation instead of updating links one at a time.
• Move at your own pace. Route selected paths to a new storefront while the rest stay on the existing system.
• Less to manage across regions. Keep rules and application logic together, with Fabric handling regional distribution and failover.

Public implementation references

Redirector template provides rule imports, scheduled activation, version selection, and redirect lookups, with an example CDN integration.

HTTP Router provides redirect, proxy, and rewrite tools for directing requests to configured backends. These components are building blocks for the application shown above.

Before launch, test destinations, campaign timing, and the path shoppers take through both storefronts. Agree how cached redirects expire and how to reverse a change: a rule update cannot recall a redirect already cached in a browser. Configure backend timeouts and failure handling separately from Fabric’s regional failover.

Start with one campaign or migration

Choose one set of old links and a small group of storefront paths. Test the destinations, activate the change, and rehearse a rollback. Compare time to publish, time for shoppers to reach the right page, and broken or repeated redirects. Test a regional outage and an unavailable storefront separately before expanding.

Bring your redirect inventory, campaign calendar, and migration plans to a Harper traffic-management workshop. Prove one smooth transition, then expand.

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