Redirections by Rank Math

Redirect non-existent content easily with 301 and 302 status code. This can help reduce errors and improve your site ranking.

Author:Rank Math (profile at wordpress.org)
WordPress version required:4.6.0
WordPress version tested:5.4.1
Plugin version:1.0.2
Added to WordPress repository:27-03-2019
Last updated:25-04-2020
Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
Rating, %:100
Rated by:3
Plugin URI:https://rankmath.com/wordpress/plugin/redirec...
Total downloads:8 887
Active installs:700+
plugin download
Click to start download

The Most Advanced Redirections plugin for WordPress

★★★★★

One of the most painful parts of managing a growing website is to manage its redirects. The seemingly simple process of directing a URL to another is not so simple to achieve. You need a decent understanding of code and then make changes to your .htaccess (or .conf file) file to achieve the mundane, but important task of creating redirects.

To ease all of these problems and allow anyone to create and manage redirects, we created Redirections. It’s a simple and powerful plugin that will help you create, edit, and manage your redirects, thus empowering you to grow your website. It features an easy to use interface, supports all the important types of redirects, and even lets you edit your redirects whenever you wish.

The process of redirection is simple and straightforward, but there are many creative uses of redirection that are very useful. Here are some of the use-cases that you can use Redirections for.

  • Redirect Old URLs to New Ones
    If you change or move content on your website, you’ll need to redirect the old URL to the new one if you want to retain the rankings of the page.

  • Create Your Own URL Shortener
    If you regularly share your URL in places where readability is important, then you can create a short URL of the page specifically for sharing and redirect it to the main page. This technique is regularly used by podcasters to share URLs of the posts that they discuss.

  • Moving Your Website
    When you move your website to a new domain name, it is absolutely critical to redirect all the URLs from the old domain to the new one. A redirect manager helps immensely in this case.

  • Update Your URLs
    If you update your old content and change the URL to reflect the changes, you will need to create a redirect from the old URL to the new URL.

  • Create Clean Affiliate Links
    A regular affiliate link is a mess of tracking codes and variables which looks ugly and intimidating. By creating a redirect, you can create a pretty URL for your affiliate links.

  • Manage Temporary Redirects
    Updating a piece of content and don’t want visitors to see it? Create a temporary redirect to a new page in the meantime.

  • Comply with the Law
    If you host some content that cannot be displayed to a certain group of people for any legal reason, you can redirect those people to an error page, or a page explaining the restriction.

  • Run Limited Time Offers
    Running offers for a limited time? Create a redirect to another page after the offer expires.

And many more….

Unique Features of Redirections

Redirections is equipped with all features imaginable to fix broken links and errors. It can help you fix individual errors, preemptively create redirects, and use some regex magic to migrate entire websites. Basically, you can use it to solve simple problems or unleash its power to handle complex redirects, and it can handle it all. Here is the complete list of features built-into the Redirection Plugin.

  • Simple and Intuitive Interface
    Redirections is amazingly simple to use. There are no confusing menus, and no codes to deal with. You can create redirects visually, easily, and in just a couple of clicks. Even if you’re new to WordPress, you will have no trouble understanding and using Redirections.

  • Lightweight and Fast
    Creating a redirect should be fast, and the Redirect Manager manager fits the definition perfectly. No matter how complex the redirect, you can configure it easily in just a few easy steps.

  • Secure
    A considerable amount of man-hours were invested in making Redirections ultra-secure. Our dedicated team of experts designed hundreds of tests before we decided to release Redirections to the public.

  • Supports Multiple Redirection Types
    There are multiple types of redirections, and each one is useful in a certain scenario. It is important to choose the right type of redirection to guide search engines and users to the most appropriate content. That is why Redirections supports many types of redirections. Here are some details.

    • 301 Permanent Redirection
      The 301 Redirect is the standard for permanent redirection. When you’re creating a redirect to another URL permanently, you should use 301 Redirection code.

    • 302 Temporary Redirect
      If you need to redirect a URL temporarily to another URL, you should use the 302 Temporary Redirect option.

    • 307 Temporary Redirect
      The 307 is another temporary redirect and is similar to a 302 redirect, but with some technical differences. To explain it simply, when the search engines see a 307 redirect, they don’t cache it. That means if a request is made for the URL again, the search engines won’t go to the destination URL automatically and check the source URL again to see if the redirect is still in place.

    • 410 Content Deleted
      If you’ve deleted a piece of content and have no suitable replacement for the content, you should not blindly redirect it to your home page. Instead, you should serve a 410 Content Deleted which will tell the search engines to naturally de-index the content.

    • 451 Content Unavailable For Legal Reasons
      Not technically a redirect, but useful nevertheless. The 451 Content Unavailable is useful when there are legal reasons for blocking a piece of content. The legal reasons can be copyright, privacy, blasphemy, or any other law or court order.

  • Multiple Matching Methods
    There are simple redirects which are easy to create and then there are complex redirects which are not so easy to understand, create, or manage. The Redirect Manager does a terrific job at making all redirects types simple to implement and manage with the various matching methods. Here are the supported matching methods.

    • Exact Match
      Exact matching works exactly as it sounds. It redirects a URL if it matches the URL you entered exactly.

    • Contains
      The Contains matching redirects any URL which contains the phrase you enter. For example, if you enter ‘press,’ then URL containing ‘wordpress’ will also be redirected.

    • Starts With
      Redirects URLs only if it starts with a particular phrase.

    • Ends With
      Redirects URLs only if it ends with a particular phrase.

    • Regex Support
      The Redirect Manager fully supports Regex, using which you can create the most complex redirections possible. Regex is very useful when you’re making large changes to your website, and a lot of URLs matching strict rules have to be redirected to a new URL.

    • Combination of all of the Above
      An amazing feature of the Redirection Manager is that you can use all of these rules together. That means you can create several conditions using any of the matching URLs and redirect them to a single destination URL. Using this feature, you can create the most complex redirects with ease. Not only that, you’ll be able to edit and manage this redirect later on with the same ease as well.

Bulk Operations

An underrated feature of the Redirection Manager is the bulk redirection creation feature. Let us explain that with an example. Usually, if you have 10 URLs that you need to redirect to a new URL, you have to create individual redirect rules for them. This is inefficient and wastes a ton of time.

In the Redirection Manager, the process is completely opposite. Here, you just copy all the URLs at the same time and paste it in the redirection URL field. The Redirection Manager will detect that you’ve pasted multiple URLs and create individual entries for each of them. What’s even better is that you can configure each of the entries with any of the matching methods we’ve mentioned above. After you’ve done that, you can create more entries to the redirect manually as you would normally do. This flexibility gives you a lot of power and speed when you’re creating redirects.

Advanced Options

Apart from creating and managing redirects, we’ve included some advanced options in the Redirection Manager which will help you diagnose issues and overall help with the administration of your site. Here are some of the options.

  • .htaccess Export
    With this feature, you can export all your redirects in a single file that can be added to a .htaccess file. This is a useful feature when you’re migrating sites or copying your redirects to another website that uses an Apache server.

  • Nginx Export
    The Redirection Manager can also export all your redirects to an Nginx server compliant file. This feature is useful when you’re moving or copying your redirects to a website that uses the Nginx server.

  • Debug Mode
    This is one of the most important features of the Redirection Manager. When you’re fixing a couple of 404 errors, then the repercussions of making a mistake are small. However, if you’re creating a redirect rule that will affect thousands of URLs, you have to be absolutely sure that your configuration is 100% correct. To help with this process, we’ve included a debug mode inside the Redirection Manager.

    Once enabled, any redirect that happens on your website will be interrupted by an interstitial page. The page will display the source URL (that is being redirected) and the destination URL (where the redirection is taking you). The interstitial pauses the redirect for 5 seconds, after which the redirect takes place. However, you can pause the redirect entirely for diagnosis. The interstitial page also contains links that will take you to the specific URL that triggered the redirection, helping you diagnose misconfigured redirects in a jiffy.

    Please note that the interstitial page is visible only to administrators of the website, and the end users will not be affected at all with this. Also note that all active redirects will work as usual while the administrator uses the debug mode as well, so the regular operation of your website is not affected in any way.

  • Extends the WordPress Auto Redirect
    The Redirect Manager is stable, secure, and safe as it extends WordPress’s redirect functionality. Instead of creating complex redirect operations, the Redirect Manager uses the native redirection feature of WordPress and adds the layer of functionality that makes it possible to have a greater degree of control over the redirects that you create. Because of this architecture decision, the Redirection Manager is also future-proof and has negligible chances of causing issues with WordPress updates.

How To Supercharge the Redirection Plugin

The Redirection Plugin is pretty awesome and a great stand-alone plugin. But, to fix a problem, you have to find the problem, which in this case is mostly broken links.

Usually, you’d have wait for Google to completely crawl your website, then log into your Google Search Console account and download a list of all the broken links and then start fixing them.

Or you’d have to install a plugin that will crawl your entire website for links and use all your server resources. Or you’d have to pay for a 3rd party to tool to do this job.

But, there is a better way! Just use our 404 Monitor plugin.

The 404 monitor is another plugin by Rank Math that captures all the 404 errors on your website. It records the URL, when it was last accessed, and how many times it was accessed. It can also capture the referred and user agent from the error occurred. Using all this information, you can instantly fix the problems that have the most impact.

That’s not all. The 404 Monitor and the Redirect Plugin work great together. When you install both the plugins, you can create redirects for all your error causing URLs in a single click. It works like magic!

If you enjoy using the Redirection Plugin and/or the 404 Monitor Plugin, then you must check out Rank Math SEO. It’s a game-changing FREE SEO plugin that has more features than many premium products. The 404 Monitor and the Redirections Plugin are included with Rank Math SEO, along with all the awesome features that are included in it. Make sure to check them out.

About the Developer

Redirections is created by the same people who have created Rank Math SEO, the WordPress SEO suite. It’s a powerhouse of a plugin that performs all important SEO tasks that every WordPress website needs. Usually, you’d pay hundreds of dollars for 3rd party software or premium plugins to perform a fraction of the activities that **Rank Math SEO does for FREE&&. It can perform an SEO Audit, perform SEO for local websites, has full schema support, integrates with Google Search Console, includes a 404 error tracker, a redirection manager, has AMP support, WooCommerce support, support content optimizations, etc., all for FREE, without any limits.

From within WordPress

  1. Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’
  2. Search for ‘Redirections by Rank Math’
  3. Install Redirections once it appears
  4. Activate Redirections from your Plugins page.
  5. Go to “after activation” below.

Manually

  1. Upload the redirections folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  2. Activate the Redirections by Rank Math plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Go to “after activation” below.

After activation

  1. You should see the ‘Rank Math’ menu in the dashboard sidebar.
  2. From there you can create new redirections.
  3. You’re done!