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How To Redirect Pages In WordPress

By James LePage
 on November 27, 2020
Last modified on January 7th, 2022

How To Redirect Pages In WordPress

By James LePage
 on November 27, 2020
Last modified on January 7th, 2022

This article is going to discuss multiple ways that you can go about redirecting a page in WordPress. Page redirects are a fact of any website, and vital to search engine optimization and search engine ranking placement. You may be worried about setting up a page redirect in WordPress, as the typical way redirects work is through a .htaccess file or by writing PHP rules, but luckily (as with most aspects of WordPress) there's a plugin that makes this task incredibly easy for you. 

In fact, there are several WordPress plugins that help you set up page redirects in an easy manner. In this article, we are going to take a look at the top two plugins for adding page redirects to a WordPress website, and why we use both of them on client projects. 

First, let's talk about why you would want to set up page redirects on a WordPress website. There are two very common SEO issues that using page redirects can resolve. If you have old content, broken links, or a combination of those two, you will have a collection of 404 errors on a website, not only resulting in a poor user experience, but typically ending in SERP penalties. 

Another very popular reason that you may want to redirect a page in WordPress is simply that you want to point users to another area of your website. You can even get creative with WordPress redirects, and set up user agent based redirects, geographical redirects that push visitors from a certain location to specific landing pages, incorporate regular expression rules, and generally very users around your website using redirect rules that lead to the highest conversion rate. Basically, understanding how to set up WordPress redirects is incredibly important for any owner to grasp. 

The first plugin mentioned in this article is the most popular redirection plugin which suits 90% of every user's needs. 

Redirections is freely available on the WordPress repository, and in essential plugin for virtually any website. We definitely recommend that any WordPress designer, developer, creator, or website owner, figures out how to use this plugin in its complete form. It is incredibly powerful, and incredibly useful from a search engine optimization standpoint, as well as a practicality standpoint. 

This is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress with good reason. It comes with a ton of features and is 100% free. You can set up basic redirects, associate redirection codes like 301, 302, and more, but also access advanced features like regular expression rules, allowing you to create patterns that match specific patterns of URLs. A recent addition to this plugin allows you to monitor when posts an page permalinks are changed, automatically creating a new URL.  

However, the thing that makes this so valuable to us is the fact that you can easily set up conditional redirects. This can be based on the logging status of a user, the browser, the referral, the HTTP headers, a custom WordPress filter, an IP address, a server, or a ton of other options. This makes it really powerful, and you are able to hypertarget specific users and user groups with re directions. The only thing that is missing is the ability to redirect based on Geo location. 

You can also set up query parameter handling, and even export redirects to a NGINX rewrite rules file. 

This tool is 100% free, and the best option for you if you are looking to setup page redirects in your WordPress website. It is incredibly powerful, but also designed in a way that makes it inviting accessible to users of all skill sets, from absolute beginners, to hardened developers. 

This next plug-in is the pro version of a free redirect plugin that you can find in the repository, and comes with some features that might make the price worth it to some users. 

WP 301 Redirects Pro brings a couple of nifty features to the table. 

The main selling point of the pro version of this plugin is the fact that you get access to a pretty dashboard, redirection statistics, and professional support. They typically run discounts throughout the year, so if you can get this at a low price, it could be a neat addition to a website. However, in our opinion the plugin mentioned above and the SEO plugins that includes the automatic redirection tracking can probably replace this. 

There are some other paid plugins out there that help you with redirects as well, but the one mentioned above seems to offer the most value for the price it is asking. 

Another option that you have access to for free if you are looking to set up page re directions in WordPress is RankMath or any other major SEO plugin. each of these tools have a watered down version of the free redirects plugin included with them. We typically don't use them because they don't support advanced features like import and export, regex, and more, but they are included in these plugins if you simply need to redirect basic pages. Additionally, these plugins will typically identify that you have deleted a post or changed a URL slug, and automatically set up a redirect in their system for you. Sometimes, we use both the SEO redirection tool, as well as a dedicated plugin for more advanced redirects, but this may slow down your website. It is completely up to you and your needs! 

Now, if you are looking to set up geographical redirects on a WordPress website, there is a third plugin that we would recommend. This plugin is dedicated to the simple task of figuring out where a user is coming from, location wise, and then pointing them to a specific page created for that region. 

We are going to write a complete tutorial article on how to use this plugin, but in case you are looking, we always recommend Geo redirects for WordPress if you are looking for that functionality. It isn't built into the other two plugins mentioned here. 

You are looking to set up re directions in your WordPress website, we hope that this article, how to add page redirects to a WordPress website, was beneficial. If you have any individual questions, feel free to reach out in the comment section below! 

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Article By
James LePage
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James LePage is the founder of Isotropic, a WordPress education company and digital agency. He is also the founder of CodeWP.ai, a venture backed startup bringing AI to WordPress creators.
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