How to Redirect WordPress Posts & Pages with 301 Redirects

What’s the first thing which comes to your mind after creating a WordPress website? Search engine optimization? As a WordPress site owner, you have probably heard that it would be challenging to create a new site or change the design of an exiting one because of the SEO. Redirects play a vital role when you are planning to make a big switch. Having broken links will result in a loss of traffic. There are multiple ways to add Redirects in WordPress. So let’s know more about 301 redirects!

What is WordPress 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect is a simple way to re-route traffic coming to a Requested URL to different Destination URLs, in a simple way of speaking that is a way to redirect your users from one web page to another.

When you are creating your web pages and generally content on your site, for every web page, there is an appropriate URL-Uniform Resource Locator.

That is a unique web page address for every page. When your site is created for the first time, all of your web content is associated with the URL. Search engines crawl your website content and map every page and URL on your website.

When you want to change your existing content or add new, you have to ensure that your old pages are connected with your new ones. Because if you don’t redirect your users, those who click on your old website URLs will get a “404 page not found” message.

Feeling lost, the user may close the website and never visit again. Hence to avoid bad user experience and to ensure good SEO practices, when you are creating new web pages or changing content on your WordPress website, you should add 301 Redirects.

Now, there are multiple ways to handle redirects. Let’s understand how we can add manually.

WordPress Redirect with .htaccess

This web server configuration file is present in your WordPress root directory. In case you are unable to see the file, select the option to show hidden files.

Before you make any changes, please ensure that you take the backup of this file. Any error in the file will break your website. Hence it is essential to take backup.

You may require developer’s assistance to edit this file. You can edit the file in a plain text editor.

To add a redirect, add the following lines at the end of the file:

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /old-url/
http://example.com/new-url/

301 is the redirect type, which informs that the old URL is permanently moved to the new URL.

If you find this daunting, there is a much simpler way to do this. There are various plugins available in the WordPress repository. You can easily redirect URL to the new post or page using the plugin without making any changes in the .htacess.

We recently tried our hands-on  WordPress 301 redirects plugin.

Why Use 301 Redirects Plugin?

Replacing your old site design with a new one or re-designing your web site

Now when you have your site for some time, and you rank very well in the Google search result. You surely want to stay in the same position, right?

But your site is old and needs some re-design, and some may be small or significant changes. You may not want to play with .htaccess to change multiple URLs. Here WordPress 301 Redirects will ease your job. Because for every old page that you had, you can now use an easy way to redirect your users to your new pages, and all of your problems are solved. Your SEO and user experience will be saved.

Updating your WordPress content

When you are re-organizing your WordPress content, adding new content, changing exiting one, you should redirect your visitors to your new web pages.

For example, you have some old content on your website, and you want to refresh old or add some new content. Now when you do that, you want to inform Search Engines that content on your pages is updated, moved, or changed. Serving 301 Redirects tells not only the Search Engines but also browser bots that your content is moved permanently. Search Engines will interpret this that not only that the page changed its location but that the content or updated version of it can be found at this new URL. With 301 Redirects, Search Engines will carry all your rankings and trust from your previous pages and credit the new pages and done it fast.

Old deleted posts

When you have content that is no longer available, you want to redirect your users to your new web pages.

You don’t want to lose all of your previous value, rankings in Search Results. Certainly, you don’t want to lose all of that SEO juice, and you definitely should use 301 Redirects to take users to correct a new page.

Fortunately for all of this, there is an easy way. With a simple installation, you can perfectly preserve all of your previous SEO and avoid terrible user experience.

How To 301 Redirects In WordPress?

Download and install the plugin from the:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/eps-301-redirects/

Once you have installed the plugin, you should see the 301 Redirects option in the Settings menu of your dashboard.

To create a new redirect, enter the URL from where you want to redirect your users in the Redirect From field. You can choose the Redirect to URL from the dropdown menu to redirect users to your; Pages, Posts, Custom Post Types, Archives, and Term Archives. Or instead of that, you can set a custom URL as well.  Additionally, you can retain query strings across redirects with the capability of super fast redirection.

This plugin also provides the bulk import/ export feature. You can easily manage your redirections with this feature.

Conclusion

The longer your website is present with quality, valuable, and relevant content, the better are the chances of ranking higher in the search results. As a website owner, you have the responsibility to ensure that your users have a pleasant experience visiting your pages.

Many factors have an impact on your search results. Redirects is one of significant factor which has a direct effect on ranking. A 301 Redirect is a permanent redirect which passes link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. This will help you to improve your SEO and overall user experience.

And that’s all from our end. You can pick the most suitable method as per your convenience. We hope you found this article useful.