How to 301 Redirect Url in WordPress

Every now and then the webmaster has to update his site. He will delete some non performing posts, pages or he will change some categories. While doing this he has to make sure that the pages or posts he changed does not end in 404 Error. This will impact his SEO rankings till some extent. So one has to take caution and make sure that the old ursl has to be redirected to new ones. While doing this it should be 301 Redirect.

Ways to do 301 Redirect

.htaccess – 

You can use Apache .htaccess file to do 301 redirect. In this approach one has to have some Linux  and basic shell scripting knowledge. The webmaster can edit the htaccess file for their website and enable mod rewrite module. Once that is enabled and checked he needs to add some code to the htaccess file.

E.g. is shown above. This is very simple example and sometimes you may have to redirect a lot more and complex urls. This is where it could get tedious to manage.

Using Redirection Plugin

As our main focus is WordPress websites, the best option to achieve 301 redirect is using the Redirection plugin. Redirection is very robust and widely supported plugin available for redirecting urls. Its been used by more than 900K users.  You dont need any Apache, Linux or any webmaster knowledge to use this plugin.

The plugin comes with easy to handle configuration, where you can define what is the old url and where it should be redirected to.

You can see that the plugin gives you option to specify what type of header needs to be sent when the url is accessed.

Redirection Features

As mentioned the plugin comes with loads of useful features.

Logging – All the redirection we have setup using this plugin are logged. It keeps track of when the url was accessed, referred and IP. You can specify how many days you want to keep the logs in the system. After this period, the logs will be purged.

Import/Export – This is one of the most important feature. If you have lots of ursl that needs to be redirected, you can use this option. The plugin accepts csv and json files from which it can bulk import the redirection data. At the same time, it has option to export your redirection data for any future use or migration.

Apart from this it has other options to configure the purging of logs.

Summary

All in all the Redirection plugin is very useful if you are restructuring your website and you don’t want to get penalized on your SEO rankings. This plugin is best free option available. and its as powerful as the premium and paid options.