If you’re like me, then you may have created your first website years ago with basic html. You might have been proud of your old website but over time you realized that you needed something more powerful. That is when you discovered WordPress.
You probably got excited by all the cool features WordPress had to offer and wanted to power your website with the software. Or maybe you just have old url’s that you now realize are not user friendly or SEO optimized. So how do you go about changing these url’s to something that is better for your website, visitors and search engine? Obviously you don’t want to have duplicate content issues and most of your old url’s have already been indexed by the search engines.
301 Redirects with your .htaccess file
You can always use your .htaccess file to handle the redirects. Let me show you a snippet of code that you would have to properly place in your .htaccess file. Warning, messing with your .htaccess file can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The code below is just for demonstration.
//Rewrite to www
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com[nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
//301 Redirect Old File
Redirect 301 /oldfile.html /newfile
I can hear you now, you don’t really want to mess with code.
There’s a WordPress Plugin for that
This is where the WordPress Redirection Plugin comes in. Redirection.
Below is some information from the landing page for the plugin.
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.
And it’s 100% free!
New features include:
- 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
- Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
- Full logs for all redirected URLs
- All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
- Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!
Existing features include:
- Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
- Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
- Full regular expression support
- Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
- Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
- Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
- Fully localized
As you can see it’s a feature rich plugin that makes it extremely easy to manage 301 redirects for your website.
The Takeaway
The beauty of using WordPress is there tends to be a plugin that makes the difficult tasks easy. All without learning to code. As always, thank you for visiting PixemWeb and I hope you found this article helpful. Check out the video above for a demonstration on how to use the plugin.