If you are a site owner using WordPress for a long, you might need to make some changes to your site. Certain changes could be anything from deleting posts or pages, broken links or just migrating content to complete website redesign.
There, although it’s a possible chance that in making these changes, the URL structure of the site changed.
With this in mind, you’d want to redirect the visitor to a message or a link to the new update post or page. This WordPress Wednesday I will present you five WordPress Redirect Plugins that can help you in guiding the visitor to the right location of your content.
Before proceeding further, let’s first understand what the redirects are and how they work.
Redirect is a function through which your site sends a quick message to the browser informing them that the page or post they want to visit has moved. You can also provide a link to the new content, to which you wish to redirect the visitor or can redirect automatically.
1. Safe Redirect Manager
Safe Redirect Manager is the first free and one of the best redirect plugin that you can find in the WordPress plugin directory. With this plugin, you can simply redirect any pages and posts to new URLs with HTTP status codes like 302 and 301.
This plugin has been designed to handle heavy traffic and available in English and other languages, Safe Redirect Manager is a lightweight plugin which is awesome to be used on high traffic publishing websites.
Price: Free
2. SEO Redirection
You can set up a variety of redirects for your site using the SEO Redirection plugin. With this plugin, you can monitor 404 error pages and redirect them to another location with peace. You can even redirect entire folders and everything they contain, like your index.html file.
SEO Redirection will automatically add a 301 redirect when the URL of a post changes. It also keep track of all the redirects on your site in one place.
Price: Free
3. Broken Link Checker
Created by WPMU Dev the Broken Link Checker help site owners monitor not only their posts and pages, but also their comments, custom fields, and blogroll. Once the plugin been installed, it automatically scans your site for broken links.
Once the scan is done it will then notify you either by email or a dashboard notification when it’s done scanning. In a new tab of your dashboard labelled Broken Links, you can edit the links directly without having to update each post and page manually. If you rather not add a new URL to redirect the link, you can remove it and the text will stay the same.
Price: Free
4. Redirection
Redirection is the plugin for you if you want to keep track of your 404 errors and manage the 301 redirects from your site.
With this plugin, you don’t need any knowledge of Apache or Nginx to accomplish the tasks. You can configure the plugin to automatically create a redirect when the permalink of a post or page is changed or when other conditions been met.
Redirection’s has a configurable logging feature to view all redirects occurring on your site and to keep track of information about the visitor, the browser they used, and the referrer.
Redirection is a perfect choice if you plan to migrate your content from one site to another, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.
Price: Free
5. 404 Solution
The 404 Solution plugin which is available for free in WordPress’s official directory will automatically redirect 404 URLs to existing pages on your site and logs the errors.
If you’ would prefer to setup redirects manually or simply review the auto-redirects, then you can view the logged errors in your WordPress dashboard. The plugin will also provide a list of page suggestions to help you find the best possible match for the URL that the visitor was trying to reach.
Price: Free
