Manage 301 Redirects with Redirection

With over one million active installs and a 10 year track record, Redirection is the most popular redirect manager in the WordPress ecosystem.

Redirect Management

You can setup redirects in all sorts of ways, but by far the easiest is to use a plugin like Redirection.

As your WordPress website ages and you build and rebuild it over time, there are bound to end up with some posts or pages that have been deleted or moved. When old traffic hits those URLs, the user will hit your 404 page (page not found). That’s bad for user experience and for SEO.

Using a redirect manager allows you to log 404 errors and create 301 (moved permanently) redirects to the page or post’s new location–with no need for messing with Apache or Nginx config files (like .HTaccess). If your WordPress install supports pretty permalinks then you can use Redirection to redirect any URL.

Because Redirection creates these redirects in the same way WordPress naively handles pretty permalinks, there’s no performance hit.

Download Redirection

How Much?

Redirection is free. Yeah, free. There’s not even a premium version you need to pay for to unlock all the features. It’s just a great plugin built by a great WordPress developer, John Godley.

How to Create & Manage Redirects

The redirect management page is where you’ll do most of the work in Redirection. It consists of a table with all your redirects and a section to add new ones. You’ll find it under Tools >> Redirection.

You can then click Add New and complete the “Add New Redirect” form, but let’s assume you want to create a redirect for a 404 error.

1. Go to Tools >> Redirection
2. Click 404s link at the top to pull up the 404 error pages log
3. Hover over a row that you want to redirect and click Add Redirect
4. Paste the full URL into the Target field where you want the redirect to go
5. (Optionally) Check “Delete all logs for this 404” to do just that
6. Click the Add Redirect button

That’s pretty much it.

What a lot of 404s!

Don’t worry.  If you see a lot of 404s in the log like /404javascript.js or 404testpage4525d2fdc, those are SUPPOSED to go to a 404 error page.  Delete those or just ignore them.

Advanced Stuff

Redirection also has a lot of advanced features like conditional redirects (if user logged in, redirect here; otherwise, redirect there) and regular expressions (REGEX).  It also sports a full-featured import & export system.

You’ll find all sorts of great documentation on this advanced stuff at redirection.me/support/.