Redirection - great plugin to easily redirect 404 not found page (Review 2021)
Clicking on a broken link on a website must have made you feel frustrated and wasting your time. As a result, it left you with a bad experience with that website. From the website owner’s point of view, that accident surely affects the site ranking. To avoid that, you might start using “URL redirect”.
URL Redirect or URL Forwarding is a technique to redirect your domain’s visitors to a different URL. You can forward your domain name to any website, webpage, etc. which is available online. There are some reasons why you need to redirect your link: if you delete content, managing multiple domains, migrating to a new domain, and changing a post’s URL. This will prevent your visitors from encountering the “404 not found” or “410 error”. Find out more here.
There are several redirect managers available that’ll make redirecting URLs a lot easier. One of them is the Redirection plugin from WordPress. Here, we will introduce you to Redirection plugin.
Getting Started
Redirection is a WordPress plugin by John Godley. It has been around for 10 years and has 2.000.000+ active installations in WordPress. This plugin helps you to manage 301 redirects, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.
Using this plugin, you can reduce errors like making your page not found on the internet and improve your site ranking. Not only comes for free, but the plugin is also available in multiple languages, making it easier to use.
What are the features of Redirection?
301 redirects
Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes. Or, manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirects for a WordPress post, or for any other file.
Full logging
View all redirects on your site, including information about the visitor, the browser used, and the referrer. A ‘hit’ count is maintained for each redirect to track whether the URL is being used actively or not.
Track 404 errors
See where your 404 errors are on your website and fix them directly with 301 redirects.
Pass through redirection
Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
Conditional redirects
All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist but also under special conditions like redirect based upon login status, certain browser, link from another page (referrer), and HTTP header.
Apache and Nginx support
You can export your redirect URLs from Redirection to Apache or Nginx.
REGEX available
Redirection is compatible with Search Regex that will allow you to bulk update your redirects.
Import & export options
Move your redirect data back and forth between Redirection to Apache, Nginx, and JSON. You can use WP CLI to import and export your data automatically.
Complete documentation
Redirection statistics can tell you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
Why do I need to use Redirection?
Avoid the visitor to encounter “404 not found” and “410 error”
When you delete content, migrate to a new domain, or change a post’s URL from your website, you need to redirect your link first. This will prevent your website to show the 404 not found and the 410 error page to your visitor.
With the Redirection plugin, you can immediately redirect your link straight from your WordPress without the hassle to install a third-party application.
Easy & simple management
You can use the Redirection plugin to create and manage redirect easily and quickly as you don’t need to learn about Apache and Nginx. Redirection can redirect any kind of URLs in which your WordPress supports permalinks. The redirects support regular expressions and match any number of URLs.
If you change the permalinks of your posts and pages, a redirection will be automatically created. Not only that, Redirection can detect which page from your site experience a 404 not found, so that you can immediately redirect it to another page.
Custom your redirects
Set your redirects based on customized conditions like when the visitors log out of your website, come from certain sites, or mobile users. Here is the example for conditional redirects:
- Login Status : redirect only if the visitor is logged in or logged out of the website
- Browser : redirect if the visitor is using a certain browser
- Referrer : redirect if the visitor visits the link from another page
It is free
The Redirection plugin is 100% available for free. There is no premium version and no need to pay money to get access to the full features. You can redirect links in your website to your heart content without limitations.
When do I need to use Redirection?
- Deleting a post or page in favor of new content
- Refer the visitors to a new page as the site or a page on your website has been moved
- Change the permalinks of your post or page
- Overhauled a website’s permalink structure and need to redirect old URLs to their new structure
- Updating a published page or post and want to temporarily redirect traffic to a different post or page while you work on the update.
Also read: How to Redirect URL Properly Without Hurting SEO
Where can I get Redirection?
You can install Redirection for free. There 3 ways to install this plugin through:
- Directly from WordPress Plugins Page
Open your WordPress admin panel. Go to the plugins page and search “Redirection”. Click install now.
- Manually download the plugin
Just visit the WordPress.org plugin site here and click the install button. Unzip the file and copy the plugin directory to your `wp-content/plugins` directory. Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress admin and activate the plugin.
How to use Redirection?
Pros
- Totally free without the premium version
- Easy to use
- No need to learn Apache .htaccess
- Quick to set up
- Comes in multiple languages
Cons
- Decrease page loading speed
- Manually input redirect links
What are the alternatives to Redirection?
There are other plugins that can be your choices besides the Redirection plugin:
- 301 Redirects – simple redirect plugin with a user-friendly interface.
- AIOSEO (All in One SEO) – SEO plugin with redirection manager add-ons
- SeedProd – page builder that comes with customizable redirect pages.
- Safe Redirect Manager – easy and simple redirect plugin with actions and filters.
- All 404 Redirect to Homepage – simplest redirect plugin that automatically redirects broken links to the homepage.
Conclusion
Redirection is a free plugin from WordPress. The plugin works by moving your page with a broken link to another page with an active link. This will prevent your visitors from leaving your website caused by 404 not found and that’s how you don’t lose your traffic for your website. We recommend you to use this plugin to 301 redirect your broken link page as it is already available for free in WordPress.
References
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