Imagine you go to your favorite restaurant and find that it is closed. We know that you will be extremely sad at this. However, if you see a board there that says that your favorite restaurant has been moved to a new space, you’ll gain back your happiness. Not only for customers but this board is also equally helpful for the restaurant owner as you will not lose any of your loyal customers due to this. What’s best is that all you needed to do was to place a simple signboard that ‘redirects’ all your existing customers to the new location of your restaurant.
There are times and situations when you need to move your WordPress website to a new URL or location on the internet. Some of these situations include similar domain names, new domain acquisition, logging outgoing links, URL optimization, device targeting, and geotargeting and manipulating search engines and visitors. Hence, if you face any of these situations, or simply want to redirect your website to a new URL, read the complete blog to understand everything you need to know to create redirects in WordPress. But before we jump to the steps, let us take a look at the meaning and types of redirects that can be used with WordPress.
What is a Redirect?
As we can see in the above example, a redirect is a simple way to take your site users and search engines to a different URL than the one requested originally. In simple words, it enables your website to transmit a quick signal to your reader’s browser so that it can automatically send them to the new page or location you want. Many people assume that redirections are useful only if you need to change your website URL, however, it is not so. Redirections are also useful if you want to utilize the key domain names of your niche to generate traffic as you can automatically redirect all these domains to your primary domain. Although, you need to understand the types of redirects before using them extensively on your site.
Types of Redirects
Redirects for WordPress websites are of five types. These types are divided on the basis of functionality and usage. Take a look.
| Type | Usage |
|---|---|
| 301 (Permanent Redirect) | The most used redirect that tells search engines that a page location has been permanently changed. |
| 302 (Temporary Redirect) | Tells search engines that a page location has changed for now, but not forever |
| 303 (See Other Redirect) | Mostly used on high traffic sites that involve pages with one-time data like payment gateways on e-commerce sites that are neither bookmarked nor refreshed |
| 307 (Temporary Redirect) | A successor of the 302 redirects, it is a temporary redirect used mostly during maintenance |
| 308 (Permanent Redirect) | The permanent form of the 307 redirect |
Out of these, the most common redirects that you may come across on WordPress are 301, 302 and 307.
Why are Redirects Needed?
Redirects are important not only for your site visitors but also for search engines if the content on your site has been moved or deleted. There are other reasons too for which you may need redirects. Take a look.
- Send visitors to a single domain through multiple domains.
- Direct users from your older domain to the new one.
- Avoid a 404 error page and prevent user dissatisfaction.
- Make search engines understand that your site content has been moved or deleted.
- Provide search engines instructions to crawl and index your website for better SEO.
- Remove Duplicate Content and enhance the user experience.
How to Create Redirects in WordPress
Now that you are aware of the type of redirects you may need for your WordPress site and understand their importance, let us see how can you create redirects in WordPress effectively without losing anything. Like most other difficult things related to website development, WordPress makes managing redirects easier than you can even think. You just need to choose any of the incredible plugins like Redirection, Simple 301 Redirects, and Safe Redirect Manager and install it on your WordPress site. WordPress will take care of the rest. All these useful plugins help you to easily manage 301 redirections, track all 404 errors, and keeps you aware of any loose ends your WordPress website may have.
Hopefully, now you know everything you need to know about creating redirects in WordPress and their importance. However, remember that URL redirection services if not used properly may lead to more losses than the benefits. Hence, use URL redirects only when needed and avoid phishing by using them with immense precision and utility.
