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How to Create and Manage 301 Redirects in WordPress 2024

When a search engine crawls your website and has trouble finding pages that are supposed to be there, it makes note of these negative results, and your search engine Indexing is affected. If you have ever changed a URL on your website, or your permalink structure you must add redirects in WordPress to maintain the SEO. Here in this post discuss the importance of redirect in WordPress, And how to add 301 redirects to WordPress.

What are redirects in WordPress?

In general, redirects are a way for you to automatically send visitors who land on Page A straight to Page B. Essentially, you use a redirect to automatically reroute traffic if you ever need to move a page (or pages).

There are different types of redirects you can implement on your site, usually marked by a certain number. Here’s what each one refers to, According to Search Engine People:

301 redirects deal with permanent moves

That is, a 301 redirect tells web browsers and search engines, “hey, this page has permanently moved to a new location. So treat it exactly the same as the old page” The main benefit of this permanent approach deals with SEO. According to Moz, a 301 redirect “passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page.” Basically, if you want to redirect human traffic and have your new page to maintain the same Google rankings as the old page, a 301 redirect is usually your best bet.

When do you need to setup 301 Redirects in WordPress?

Here are some examples of when you’d want to use a 301 redirect on your WordPress site.

How to Add 301 Redirects to WordPress

Redirection is one of the most popular plugins available in the official WordPress repository, helps to setup 301 redirections with few clicks.

Add 301 Redirects to WordPress via .htaccess

If you are using Yoast SEO plugin then you can easily edit your .htaccess file (more on that later) which you can use to add 301 redirects.

Set Up 301 Redirects for Moving to SSL

If you recently set up SSL, you should add 301 redirects to send http traffic to https for better security and to avoid duplicate content.

To do that, add the following code snippet:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

301 Redirect an Entire Domain via .htaccess

If you’re moving your WordPress site to a new domain name, the following code snippet will redirect every single page on your old domain to the exact same page on your new domain (assuming you keep the same permalink structure):

#Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You need to add this snippet to the .htaccess access file of your old domain name – not your new domain name.

Make sure to replace “newdomain.com” with your actual new domain name.

Redirect Posts After Changing URLs

To redirect from the old domain (https://example1.com/) to the new domain (https://example2.com/) with the specified URL structure changes (such as change post url / to .html/, you can add the following code to the .htaccess file of your WordPress installation.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Redirect posts with trailing slash to .html extension
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ https://example2.com/$1.html [R=301,L]

# Redirect categories and tags with trailing slash
RewriteRule ^category/([^/]+)/$ https://example2.com/category/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/([^/]+)/$ https://example2.com/tag/$1 [R=301,L]

# Redirect home page
RewriteRule ^$ https://example2.com/ [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Hope now you can easily add and setup 301 redirects in WordPress. Have any queries, feel free to discuss on the comments below,

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