What are the different Redirects in WordPress?

Redirect to websites is the essential thing regarding SEO.

Suppose, you have deleted one of your URL on your blog, this link will be remaining in Google index or database. When someone wants to visit that particular page, it will show a 404 page not found error. What will the reader think?

In such cases, readers will move on to the new website to find whatever they were looking for your site. In such cases, you will lose some of the traffic also the audience.

What will we do in such cases?

You will defiantly happy if all the not found URL’s on your blog will be redirected to the new specified URL. In such cases, redirects come into the picture.

Some of the bloggers offer the custom 404 page which contains a complete message about why you are not able to see the page and what you will do next? By looking at this page, readers will able to redirect to another page on the same blog or visit the home page.

Proper 404 page is essential because we don’t know how many links dead on our blog.

What are the possible reasons for the ‘page not found’ error

  • When you delete your post/page which you don’t want any more
  • When you change the URL of the post/page
  • Change of the domain name
  • Switching from WWW to without WWW
  • Changing the permalink structure in WordPress

In all the cases, Google will give the old URL to the visitors, which result in 404 pages not found.

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

Here, I am going to tell you about the different types of redirects that we are using on our website/blog

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

Above are the types of redirect with the HTTP status code stating on the left side. HTTP status code is the number which server sends to the browser about the status of the page. Most of you have heard about the 404 pages not found an error, and this is used when the server didn’t see the page which you are looking for.

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

Here, I will tell you the meaning of each redirect

301- Permanent redirect

We use this redirect when we want to redirect a specific URL to the new URL permanently. When you delete a post/page of your blog then it does not exist, we have to tell the search engine that this page is not available and we have set the new URL for this page. 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 temporary. Which tells the browser that you will need to old URL in 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 the 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 the 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 future. If you set the proper redirect for such cases, Google will defiantly give the 410 messages to readers, which is all right.

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

WordPress doesn’t come with the redirect facility. We have to do it with clear ways of using the plugins. There are few best redirect WordPress plugins available which will do it for you.

Here are some of the Redirection plugins, you may like to check

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

These both plugins will do the same function of redirection, and now, I am not going to tell about how to redirect the URL with these plugins. I will write separate tutorials about it. Stay tuned.

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Amit Kharbade

Editor/Writer at ScrollBucks
Engineer, Blogger, Writer, and the man behind ScrollBucks. Amit has been contributing to ScrollBucks since 2014. He is writing about Blogging, Adsense Guide, WordPress tutorials, Affiliate marketing, and reviews.
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