Great Wordpress Plugin: Redirection
July 11th, 2008
Managing your Site, Wordpress
If you’re not in the know, a 404 log is a list of your website pages that visitors attempted to view, but instead of showing them a page your gave them an error because the page was not found. This log is important because it represents missed opportunities. Your visitors came looking for something and you failed to provide it. This happens because incoming links and search engines don’t know you moved a file, so if someone links to your page and you move that page, that’s a 404 error.
The install is very simple, upload the folder into your plugins directory and enable the plugin. Once enabled, it will start building a 404 log. Head on over to Manage > Redirection > 404 Log to check out your log.
How cool is that? A simple screen that displays all of your 404 logs by URL, referrer or IP. You can then choose which URLs you want to fix. Sometimes people just mistype, but sometimes incoming links are wrong and need your action to fix them. Once you find a bad incoming link, click the little round green image, then fill out a new Target URL, or the page you want your bad link to forward to.
Then, to test this redirect, I simply type http://kevinboss.net/holyjesusHchrist into my browser. My “about “page should load.
This plugin even gives you a 404 RSS feed, and me being the rogue wordpress wizard I am, I placed the 404 feed right in my dashboard. It’s a little more useful than the default feeds.
There ya have it. A simple solution to a simple problem. Whether your site is new with a few pages, or 6 years old with 2,000 you’ll definitely benefit from keeping up to date with your 404 log & fixing problems as they occur.
July 12th, 2008 at 1:49 am
Very awesome plugin. Wordpress’s use of mod_rewrite is truly amazing (I need to look into the code sometime to see how it does it.)
You should write a blog post about all of the plugins you use on your blog.
July 14th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
You could use that plugin for other things, like creating a friendlier-looking affiliate link or a shorter, more user-friendly download link, couldn’t you?
August 3rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
It’s amazing
August 30th, 2008 at 3:24 am
What a great plugin. I am always amazed by the willingness of the WP community to share information and give back - Thank you.
October 11th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Great pluging… Thanks. I couldn’t figure out how to do 404 redirect pages, this plugin helped alot.
October 28th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
this is awesome, we are switching our 400 page site to wordpress or drupal by the first of the year, good to know that plugins like this exist!
cheers,
Eric
October 28th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Wordpress never ceases to amaze me, its good to see that there are some people still out there that do things for the good of things rather than profit.
Nice plugin
cheers
ste
December 10th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
There was time when majority of bloggers leave this orphan and didn’t care about redirects but now they care it just like another page of their blog. Thanks for sharing it in detail.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Although I have been using Wordpress since 1 year but I didn’t know that. That error module is quite new for me and I haven’t checked it ever. Thanks for sharing it and I am going to check it right now.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:53 am
I had the similar situation after changing default permalink option to title and day based format. After a month of changing that all my previous posts were not available by Google’s indexed pages. At the time this plugin helped me a lot and I am keeping it with all my blogs now.
March 26th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
This is a wonderful thing you’ve done. I was looking for this plug in for a while. Now I have it. Thank you
May 29th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Thank you very much for this tip! I’ve been looking a for plug-in for 404 redirects. This fits the bill!
June 7th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
redirection is always a very confusing thing for me and I am always failed to handle it both on hosting side and on application side. Even I always follow all the instructions but I got no page found errors. Anyways, I am going to try it right away and please pray for my success(It might be a silly request though).
June 26th, 2009 at 8:33 am
I have the similar problem and it is about permalinks. I am sure that it can be done via redirect because all my posts become unavailable right after changing default setting. Anyways, is it possible to do something with this plugin to solve that problem?
June 28th, 2009 at 3:46 am
Allen, You will have to make some changed in your .htaccess file to add new redirect and new rule. Please do some search on that.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:24 am
Although I have been using Wordpress since 1 year but I didn’t know that. That error module is quite new for me and I haven’t checked it ever. Thanks for sharing it and I am going to check it right now.
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