You must have encountered an error 404 a lot of times while browsing on the internet. A link can be broken for many reasons like a typo that leads to the wrong page, a page that no longer exists, or a page that was removed or transferred to another link.

Though smart webmasters and marketers manage to create fun and high-converting landing pages, a 404 “page not found” is not something someone wants on their website. Besides poor user experience, broken links can hamper your SEO efforts.

One major tactic for avoiding the possibility of a broken link is by creating a redirect for pages with URLs that have changed over time. Here is everything you need to know about WordPress redirects, and how to implement them in WordPress.

What is WordPress Redirect 

In simple terms, a WordPress redirect enables you to transfer visitors from a URL they initially requested to an alternative one. Site owners usually set up redirects because of the following reasons:

1. Visitors who have bookmarked your webpage for future reading can end up annoyed if the page doesn’t open and shows an error. Redirecting the webpage to your preferred URL is an ideal way to keep your loyal readers satisfied and maintaining your online reputation.
2. You might have a landing page with broken imagery. If visitors continue seeing the page with a broken image, it could take a toll on your user’s experience. Luckily, WordPress redirects let you send visitors to a different landing page.
3. If you are moving the webpages of your content to a new domain, redirecting helps ensure search engine spiders can index your new site’s URLs automatically and, at the same time, drop the previous ones from its index. 

In scenarios that no redirect is performed, your website visitors will see an error message while navigating your domain. It’s likely that your visitors will leave and might never return. 

Likewise, the search engine will have no context of which web page to return for a search query. Hence, redirecting web pages is an essential part of maintaining an SEO footprint and delivering the best user experience possible. 

Types of Redirects

There are a number of redirects you can use to transfer your traffic from one URL to another. The types differ slightly in the way they perform. 301 and 302 redirects are the most popular ones and will be discussed in this blogpost.

301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that informs the search engine that the address of the page they intend to send visitors has been changed. The best thing about 301 redirect is that it transfers almost 90% of the ranking power to the redirected web page.

These redirects are very popular among the online casino websites such as Best Online Casinos 247 and helps them to redirect from old/removed game pages to the newer ones.

302 redirect 

302 redirects are temporary redirects that inform the search engines that a location they are searching for is altered to a different location for some time, but not forever. 

It doesn’t transfer all the link juice to the new address. 302 is very useful when your website is going through some maintenance and troubleshooting.

When it comes to WordPress, you’d be mostly dealing with 301 and 302 redirects. With the right set-up, these WordPress redirects can improve user experience, address outdated content issues, helps you clean up your untidy website. 

How to set up a WordPress Redirect 

As mentioned earlier, there are a number of ways one can set up redirects on the site. A much simpler way of creating redirects is by using WordPress plugins. These plugins make it very easy to create redirects without needing to use an FTP to access backend, and in most cases, you don’t have to write a single line of code.

Here are some plugins that will help you to create a plugin for your WordPress redirect.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that is very popular among the users just because of it’s simple and straightforward. The plugin has been used by more than 800,000 website owners. To set up a redirect on your website, you just have to install and active the plugin. After that go to Tools, and then navigate to Redirection and start setting up your redirect.

Furthermore, redirection allows you to check your website for 404-page errors that need fixing

Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin

This particular WordPress plugin is being used by 200,000+ active users on WordPress. The best thing about this plugin is that it allows you to not only add a 301 redirect but also 302 and 307 redirects.

The plugin offers two basic functionalities – Quick Redirects and Individual Redirects. Quick redirects are quick and simple to add. While using this feature, you don’t necessarily have an existing page or page to set up in order to add a redirect.

Final Words 

Once you master the skill of adding a redirect to a WordPress site, things become quite easy. Keep in mind that adding too many redirects can actually cause your website to slow down. 

We recommend you to apply redirect where it is necessary.