What are redirects and why are they so important?
Redirection directs your old URL to a new page.
When we click on a link, we expect it to take us to the relevant page, not to get an error because the page has been moved or removed
Landing on an error page is not a good user experience. A 404 error on the page can cause the user to leave the page, which means that the conversion of this user into a customer or client, or even an email subscriber, drops significantly.
When a page shows a 404 error, the search engines will very quickly no longer index it – this means that it will soon not have any SERP ranking that it used to have. Forgetting to implement redirects can result in a loss of search engine rankings as well as unhappy users, which further means a drop in website traffic.
Any URL change or page deletion requires redirection. The rest of this text will detail the process of redirecting WordPress pages. First of all, you need to have the access data of your website’s CMS.
How to redirect pages created in WordPress
The easiest way to set up redirects in WordPress is to use a plugin.
- Login to your website’s WordPress interface in a new tab – https://www.domain/wp-admin
- Install the redirects plugin.
The add-on should be first installed, and then activated using the same button.
- First, we need to set up the settings to use the plugin.
- After installation, you can find the option of Redirection in the list under Tools.
- Then a window opens as in the picture and we can start adding redirections by clicking on the button.
- First, we enter the old URL that isn’t working, and then the new one to which we want to redirect the user (in the default example, the difference is that we added two words FROM and TO in the URL address, and because of that, the URL stopped working. That’s why we need to redirect it to the new URL so as not to lose traffic from the site).
- After adding the redirect, it should appear at the bottom of the display list.
- If for some reason we want to change the data or delete the redirect we added, we can do it on the button below.
- We can check that the redirect was successfully set by pasting the old URL that didn’t work into Google and seeing what happens. If it redirects us to the new URL and the correct page loads, it means that we have set everything up correctly.
