Can I build a redirect map in Excel or Google Sheets?

Yes. Put the old urls in one column, look up each one's target on the new site, and export two columns as csv. VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH only pairs urls whose paths are identical; for the rest you need a fuzzy match, such as Microsoft's Fuzzy Lookup add-in for Excel or a fuzzy-matching script in Google Sheets, and then a manual check of every uncertain pair.

When is a spreadsheet enough for a redirect map?

When the old site has a few dozen pages, most of them keep their path, and you already have a complete list of the old urls. Then the matching is quick to do by eye and a spreadsheet is the simplest tool there is.

What does an automated redirect mapper do that a spreadsheet does not?

It collects the old and new urls itself by crawling both sites and reading their sitemaps, normalises them so that trailing slashes and case differences do not create duplicate rows, scores every old url against every new one and sorts the uncertain pairs out for review, and writes the file in the format your platform imports, including wildcard rules for whole directories.

Why does VLOOKUP miss so many urls in a redirect map?

Because it only finds exact matches. /blog/my-post/ and /blog/my-post differ by a slash, /Services and /services by case, and /leistungen/webdesign and /services/web-design share no characters in the right order at all. Each of those needs normalising or a similarity score before a lookup can pair them.

Redirect mapping in a spreadsheet vs an automated tool

SHORT ANSWER

A spreadsheet is enough for a redirect map when the old site has a few dozen pages and you already have the full list of its urls. Beyond that, the time goes into four things a spreadsheet does not do for you: collecting every old and new url, normalising them so one page is one row, matching the pairs whose paths differ, and writing the file in the format your platform imports. An automated redirect mapper does those four steps and leaves you the part a machine should not decide alone — the doubtful rows.

How the spreadsheet method works

export the old site's urls — from a crawler, the sitemap, Search Console — into one tab, and the new site's into another.
clean both lists the same way: lowercase, no trailing slash, no query string, no domain.
pair the identical paths with VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH.
for the rest, fuzzy-match on the url, and where you have them on title and h1, then check each pair by eye.
copy the result into the two columns your platform's importer expects and save it as csv.

Step four is where plain formulas stop. Excel has Microsoft’s Fuzzy Lookup add-in, and a well-known write-up uses it to join url, title and h1 tabs with a similarity score. For Google Sheets there are scripts such as Impression’s Fuzzzy. All of them still need the crawl exports as input.

Where the spreadsheet gets slow

collecting the urls — a crawl alone misses the pages nothing links to any more — the ones most likely to hold old rankings. The sitemap, including every file of a sitemap index, has to be merged in (finding orphan urls).

duplicates — /about, /about/, /About and /about?ref=nav are one page and four rows until something normalises them.

renamed paths — /leistungen/webdesign → /services/web-design is invisible to a lookup and weak for a url-only fuzzy match; the title and the h1 are what connect them.

whole folders — a blog of 300 posts moving from /blog/ to /magazine/ is 300 rows in a spreadsheet, or one wildcard row — written differently for every importer.

the format — Webflow wants fromUrl,toUrl, Shopify Redirect from,Redirect to, Squarespace /old -> /new 301 lines. The map is the same; the spelling is not.

EXAMPLE

a 250-page site. VLOOKUP pairs 140 identical paths in a minute. The remaining 110 are where the afternoon goes: trailing slashes, a renamed services folder, and a blog whose posts all changed prefix.

What an automated mapper does instead

Silentfrog, which we make, is one such tool; the others are compared in redirect mapping tools. For the four steps above it:

crawls both sites and reads robots.txt and the sitemaps, sitemap indexes and .xml.gz included. A url list of your own can be added on top.
normalises every url, so trailing slashes, index.html, www. and case differences are one row.
pairs identical paths, then scores the rest on slug, title and h1, and sorts every row into exact, fuzzy, needs review or unmatched.
writes the file for Webflow, Shopify, the WordPress plugins, Squarespace, .htaccess, nginx or plain pairs — a whole folder as one wildcard rule where the importer supports it.

What it leaves to you is the same judgement the spreadsheet needed: the rows in needs review, and the unmatched pages that should go to a category page or be allowed to end.

redirect a directory

redirect a whole directory

map every crawled page below a directory at once — optionally as a single webflow wildcard rule that also covers urls the crawl missed.

from (old site)→to (new site)

keep sub-paths (/blog/post → /magazin/post)all to one pageexport as wildcard rule

3 pages · 3 targets exist on the new site · + wildcard /blog/(.*) → /magazin/%1

/blog/relaunch-checkliste → /magazin/relaunch-checkliste
/blog/301-vs-302 → /magazin/301-vs-302
/blog/ladezeit → /magazin/ladezeit

a directory rule: a whole folder redirected at once, with a live preview of the rows it covers.

Side by side

	spreadsheet	automated mapper
url collection	separate exports, merged by hand	crawl plus sitemaps in one run
normalising	formulas you write	built in
identical paths	VLOOKUP / INDEX-MATCH	paired automatically
renamed paths	fuzzy lookup add-in or script, then by eye	scored on slug, title and h1; doubtful rows flagged
whole folders	one row per page, or a wildcard you write yourself	one directory rule, written per importer
import file	reformatted by hand	downloaded in the importer's format
cost	nothing but time	free up to 50 pages in Silentfrog; paid above
full control	yes	yes — every row can be edited, and every edit undone

Which one to use

spreadsheet — a small site, paths that mostly stay the same, a url list you trust. It is the simplest tool there is, and nothing about a redirect map requires more.
automated — a few hundred pages or more, a changed url structure, a platform move, or an old site with years of pages nobody links to any more.

The two also combine: an automated mapper’s generic csv export is a spreadsheet, with every url, its target, the confidence and whether you verified it — useful as the record of what was decided.

In short

A spreadsheet is enough for a few dozen pages and a url list you already have.
VLOOKUP only pairs identical paths; renamed pages need a fuzzy match on url, title and h1, and a check by eye.
The slow parts are collecting all urls, removing duplicates, whole folders and the import format.
An automated mapper does those and leaves you the doubtful rows — the part that needs a person anyway.