How do you manage all the 301 redirects?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Victor Castillejos: I have another SEO question:
  I have a big web redesign project, the current website is a school, and they are using very old php, the new design is using Wordpress.
  The old website has more than 200 pages very well ranked
  My question is how do you manage all the 301 redirects?  ;directly on the htaccess? ;
  Thank you
• 
  Jeremy Estes: yes, and you'll want to make sure you redirect page-to-page as much as possible if you're planning on changing the url names.
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  Michiel Kikkert: You could use the 'redirection' plugin to manage the 301's
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  Edwin Jonk: I assume you use Apache. If you have server access you could use the httpd.conf instead of the htaccess. However you need to restart the server every time you make changes. The reason why you might do that is because it uses less CPU power (schools aren't known to have huge servers ;-)).
  
  http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3217088.htm
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  Victor Castillejos: thank you +W.E. Jonk ;I can't restart the server.. ;+Michiel Kikkert ;+Jeremy Estes ;I guess my only 2 options are htaccess or a plugin.. which one will be the best idea?
• 
  Michiel Kikkert: I guess it depends on two things;
  1) how many redirect are we looking at?
  2) how much traffic does the server get?
  
  The advantage of using the wp plugin 'redirection' is that it keeps logs of 404's for you and that it is pretty simple to add rules using regular expressions. You can also let the plugin create a rule automatically based on a 404 in the log, easily spotting missed redirects. For sites I'm transfering to another structure, i usually create rules for the top 100 or so pages (that show as indexed pages in google using site:myoldsite.com as a google search). I than monitor the redirection logs sorted on hits for the days after go live and add more redirects as you go. I managed almost seamless url transitions in google with this. Almost no loss of rank or traffic.
  
  If you have less than a 100 urls or so to deal with, add rules directly to htaccess manually. The less plugins in wordpress the better.
  
  
• 
  Cristian Oana: Here a a guide I co-wrote on the topic ;http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2285552/The-Ultimate-Platform-Migration-and-Redirection-Plan-for-SEO .
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:27:38 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/how_do_you_manage_all_the_301_redirects +Victor Castillejos
  
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  Victor Castillejos: thank you +Edwin Jonk ;!