Using the Redirection Plugin for WordPress

Posted on Dec 21 2016 by in Blog 

Objective: To redirect a URL to a different URL using the Redirection plugin for WordPress. This can take the place of 301 redirects in your .htaccess file and your affiliate redirect links. It also help you monitor your 404 errors so you can quickly fix any broken pages.

Note: You must already have the plugin installed and activated prior to using these instructions. You can find the plugin at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

 

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  STEP 1: Log in to your WP account and navigate to Manage à Redirection

  STEP 2: Enter Redirect Links

o Source URL: The original URL that you want to redirect somewhere else

o Match: How you want to match the source URL – typically “URL only”

o Action: What happens if the URL is matched – typically “Redirect to url”

o Regular expression: Checked means the source URL is a regular expression (i.e. a pattern that may match many URLs)  — typically this is left unchecked

o    Target URL: The new URL that the visitor will be redirected to if they happen to click the old one.

o    Click Add Redirection once you fill in the details

In this example, we’re taking an old page titled eos and redirecting it to http://www.yourdomain.com

Note: For the SOURCE URL, you do not enter the main site url; only the part that comes after. com, .net, etc… so start with the slash and enter everything after that. For instance, if the main site was XYZ.com and the full OLD url was http://www.XYZ.com/eos then we only enter /eos in the source url box.

You should now see the redirect listed in green as shown here.

¨  STEP 3: Manage Groups

If you have several projects or groups of urls that you will be redirecting, you can create groups for each one. For instance, maybe you’re redirecting all web pages from an old site or maybe all of your affiliate links, you can create a group for the site and another group for the affiliate links. This helps with organization.

To create a group:

o Click Groups in the Redirection navigation

o Name your group

o Click Add

As you can see here, we already have two groups, one for standard redirections and one for modified   posts. We have 289 redirects within the redirection group and they have received 56,225 hits so far.

To add redirects to a certain group:

If you want to add the redirects as you enter them. You would create the group first. Then

o Go to Groups

o Click the group name

o Once it opens, add your redirects as indicated above

To organize previously added redirects:

If you’ve already added redirects but now want to go back and group them, simply….

o Toggle each redirect you wish to add to a particular group

o At the bottom of your list, using the drop down arrow, select which group you want to move the redirects to.

o Hit Go

¨  STEP 4: Manage 404 Errors

As previously mentioned, you can quickly spot pages that are having issues by allowing the redirection plugin to log your 404 page hits. To do this, from the redirection navigation bar:

o Select Modules

o Locate the 404 Errors module from the list

o Click  the number under the HITS column

A new page will open.

Don’t panic at the large number! When you look at the log, you will notice that some pages will have been hit many times each day therefore the list or number of hit will be high. This is especially true if you only check this log once a month or less. Example: Our /favicon.ico page has been hit twice today.

From looking at the list, we can see that we have a page that needs attention. For some reason, our /blog/free-mini-site-goodies.html page is not redirecting.

This could be because we do not have a redirect for that page, possibly there is an extra space or character added or missing in the links we added to the redirect or maybe there is another problem.

To edit the redirect link, click the green Plus next to the redirect. It will open up the redirect where you can check for errors.

That’s it!