There will be a time when you will need an URL redirection. It is a very important thing for SEO and traffic. To redirect WordPress pages and post you will need a plugin.
Many people don’t pay attention to URL redirections but it’s critical for every website. Especially for big websites with a lot of traffic.
WordPress redirection is a very easy thing to do because it can be done with a plugin and the process is very simple.
In this tutorial, I will explain how to redirect WordPress pages & posts and which plugin is the best.
Table of Contents
What Is URL Redirection
URL redirection is the process when you link page A to page B and when a visitor goes to page A they are redirected to page B. It is called 301 redirects and you may see this often.
For example, if one of your post’s URLs is yoursite.com/top-muscle-cars and for some reason, you change it to yoursite.com/best-muscle-cars, the old link won’t work anymore.
When a visitor goes to the old link, there will be a 404 error, because that page is no longer exists. This means that you will lose traffic. That’s why you need 301 redirections.
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So, you redirect the old link to a new one and when visitors go to the old link, it will automatically redirect them to a new URL. This way you won’t lose traffic.
Also, it is great practice for SEO too. You can redirect not only posts but pages and the whole domain too.
Now we know how important URL redirection is and let’s see how we can redirect WordPress pages and posts.
Note: URL change is not recommended. Try to create short, good URLs once and never change them.
Install 301 Redirect Plugin
First of all, we need to install the plugin for URL redirection. Several plugins that do the job but I like 301 Redirects the most. Very easy to use and has some cool features.
Install the plugin, activate, and under the Settings, you will see the new section for 301 redirects.
This plugin doesn’t require registration or activation. You can start redirecting instantly.
How To Redirect WordPress URLs
Now, it is time to redirect pages and it is a very easy thing to do with this plugin. You just need to insert old and new links to dedicated inputs.
When you go to the Redirect Rules, you will see two inputs. The first input is for the old link, and the second one is for a new link.
In the Redirect From input, you have to insert the old link. But as you can see, you have to insert only a slug, which is the text after your domain.
For example, best-muscle-cars is a slug in yoursite.com/best-muscle-cars.
And in Redirect To you have to insert the new link, but this time you have to insert the whole link, with domain and a slug.
After that click the Save button and that’s it. Redirection is done.
Now, when visitors go to an old link, they will be redirected to a new one. So, you won’t lose traffic.
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This plugin has a great option where you can choose specific posts, pages, or images for redirection.
Under Redirect To you will see the drop-down where you can choose a post for example, and then choose a specific post where you want to redirect an old link.
With this plugin, you can redirect WordPress pages, posts, and if you ever change your domain, you can redirect old domain URLs to a new one.
Conclusion
As you can see it is very easy to redirect WordPress posts or pages without problems. You can create unlimited 301 redirects. So, if you ever change the URLs of your pages, you must always redirect them so as not to lose traffic. But try to never change URLs. Mainly the URLs of popular pages and posts.
