There is nothing more unpleasant than visiting a website and suddenly seeing the famous error 404 and a message that says “The page is not found”. It automatically drives you to immediately close the page and give up on whatever you intended. This seemingly minor problem can affect the overall SEO of the page, much-needed traffic, statistics, and in the end profitability which are the most important things when running a web place. However, when you run the website, fixing broken links and pages can waste much time and as a developer or manager, you have more important things to cope with than fixing and modifying the links.
If you want to overleap these troubles and be sure your website will never experience the same problems, then don’t go away, this article is just for you! In the next couple of rows, we will demonstrate the robust and powerful plugin that is WP 301 Redirects.
WP 301 Redirects plugin is a super practical piece of software that helps you take care with fixing old content, old and bad links, typos in URLs, and broken links that lead to traffic loss, SEO decrease, and many more problems to your page. It is super easy to download, install and set everything up using a simple interface, add necessary links and information, and let the plugin do the work.
Installation
Installation of this one is as easy as the whole use of it. You simply log in to your dashboard and click the download button to get it on your machine. Then navigate to your WordPress plugins directory and click the Add New option to upload the zip file you just downloaded. After that, all you have to do is activate it with the key you received in the email, and you are now fully prepared to begin implementing it.
Features
WP 301 Redirects comes loaded with a couple of super useful features, such as redirect rules, a link scanner, and built-in charts for different kinds of analytics.
- Redirect Rules
The first one on the features list is the Redirect rules feature that allows you to move traffic from one source to another swiftly and securely! This means you are allowed to redirect the traffic from the page to any source from the domain, our outside source.
As shown in the picture above, it lists all the pages you redirected, the time when the redirection has been created, redirect type, where from and where to has it been redirected, degree of priority, hits counter, optional tags, and action buttons (edit, and delete).
To add the redirect rule, you go to Settings then WP 301 Redirects. After that, you open the tab called Redirect Rules and click on Add new redirect rule button which will take you to another window where you need to modify the settings and that’s pretty much it.
On your website, you may set up both automatic and manual redirect rules, track all the eventual 404 errors, and have an eye on redirect logs.
Types of redirect
The plugin offers you five options when it comes to redirecting types and one cloaking option.
- 301 Redirect — as the name of the plugin says, this one is the most common option used when the URL is no longer in existence or has been relocated to another address.
- 302 Redirect — In contrast to the 301, this is a temporary redirect that you will use when the page is unexpectedly and temporarily unavailable.
- 304 Redirect — indicates that the resource has not been changed since the previous request
- 307 Redirect — the source will be temporarily redirected, which implies that the core of the source will not be affected when the request is made.
- 308 Redirect — a persistent redirect used when the redirected location makes a similar request as the original.
- Cloaking — hides the URL by source URL
Link Scanner
Another option on the list worth mentioning is the Link Scanner which allows you to swiftly scan and analyze your whole site for problematic and broken links.
To trigger the feature to start with the scan, just click on the green Check & Analyze all site Links button in the left corner after which the scanner will jump to the business and start with the process. As it works in the background, it won’t affect your progress on the site so you may freely make changes to it. This can last a couple of minutes depending on how much content you have on your site.
After the scanner finish, it will list the details of the scan which contains how many pages it scanned, total links found, and problematic links (as seen in the image below).
As shown on the right-hand side of the photo, the scanner will list the problematic links which you can immediately start fixing by clicking on the Open details button. In the section with details, you can inspect in detail listed pages with the problematic links, Target rel attributes, Redirect Status, Google Web risk, Adult Content, Domain inbound links, Alexa rank, Language, Malware status, and more!
Graphs and Statistics
WP 301 Redirects is rich with various insight options that will give you a detailed view of your site’s condition. This feature allows you to analyze Redirects and 404 Errors that may occur on your webpage. Besides that, it displays the statistics about the top countries with the most visits on the page, top browsers, the most popular devices that users access the page with, and traffic type. All these stats can be downloaded as a visually pleasing PDF file which can later be distributed in the meetings, within the team you work with, etc.
Settings
In the Settings tab, you can disable all redirections, disable redirections for logged users, delete all log tables when the plugin is deleted, and reset tables.
Pricing
While the plugin comes in both free and paid versions, there is a significant difference between these two. The features sorted by plans can be seen in the photo below. The most affordable option gives you the basic options for $49. A bit more refined plan with more options costs $59, while the most prestigious one comes for $99 with full options included.
Conclusion
In this article, we have covered the useful features the powerful plugin WP 301 Redirects has to offer. One thing is to read about how the plugin is valuable, and the other thing is to use it. We strongly recommend this one as it can be obtained affordably considering what you get.
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