What are the different Redirects in WordPress?

Redirect means we are redirecting something to another address or path. This is applicable to internet web pages.

Suppose, you have deleted one URL on your blog and when someone wants to visit the same link, it will show a 404 page not found error.

What will the reader do?

They will move to the new website to find whatever they were looking for at your site. Definitely, you will lose the traffic and readers’ trust.

To avoid this what will you do?

You have to find out the way to redirect the URLs which you have deleted. The Redirection WordPress plugin will help you to redirect the URLs to the new one.

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It is good to have a default custom 404 page that contains a complete message about why you are not able to see the page and what you can do next? A proper 404 page is essential for the site because we don’t know how many links are not working or broken on our website.

Why 404 PAGE NOT FOUND?

• When you delete the web page
• When you change the URL of the web page
• Change of the domain name
• Switching from WWW to non WWW
• Changing the permalink structure in WordPress

In all the above cases, Google will through the 404 page not found error.

We can easily handle this error by customizing our 404 pages with a proper message with proper links inside them or else we case redirect such links to another URL temporarily or permanently.

Types of Redirect

• 301 – Moved permanently
• 302 – Found
• 307 – Temporary redirect
• 410 – Content deleted
• 451 – Content unavailable for legal reasons

Above are the types of redirects with the HTTP status code stating on the left side. HTTP status code is the number that the server sends to the browser about the status of the page.

Now, you might be got confused about which redirect should you use for your blog and what is the significance of all redirects.

DONT WORRY, I am going to explain all the redirects.

301- Permanent redirect

We use this redirect when we want to redirect a specific URL to the new URL permanently. When you delete a page of your blog then it does not exist, we have to tell the search engine that this page is not available and you can redirect all the traffic to a new URL. If we don’t fix it correctly, then there might have chances that readers will get 404 pages not found the error.

307- Temporary redirect

We use the 307 redirects when we want to move the specific URL to the new URL temporarily. Which tells the browser that you will need to old URL in the future and will get back with it.

302-Found

This is also the temporary redirect, which means that the server found the requested page, but it resides in a different location. If you want to send all the readers to the new page, you can do it with this redirect.

310- Content deleted

This redirect is similar to the 404 contents not found redirect. The difference between the 404 and 410 redirects is that

• 404- Page not found
• 410- Page deleted/data deleted for some reason

Which should be the best idea to use it. 410 gives a more specific message to the reader about the content of the page. You can use this redirect if you don’t want the page/post in the future. If you set the proper redirect for such cases, Google will defiantly give the 410 messages to readers, which is all right.

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Now, all we have learned is about the redirects on the website, but how we can implement them on our blog?

WordPress doesn’t come with the redirect facility. We have to do it with the plugins. There are few best redirect WordPress plugins available which you can use.

Recommendation for Redirection plugins

• Redirection
• Safe redirect manager
• Premium SEO by Yoast plugin

All the above plugins have the same functionality as redirection. I am using Redirection WordPress plugin for all my blogs.