Redirects features

The redirect is made the moment you save, appears in the list marked as one that was made for you, and can be changed or deleted like any other. Rename it a second time and the first redirect follows, so you never end up with a chain of them. Move a category under another parent and every category beneath it keeps its old address too. If another page or category later takes an old address, the redirect made for it steps aside so the new one answers. A redirect you wrote that ends up pointing at another one gets a button naming the final address, and one press points it straight there.

Each old address is matched to the one post, category or product it named, date and all, so a newer post with the same name is never sent by mistake. The redirect is added to the list the first time somebody follows it, and a change you made before installing can be typed in. On a site that had the plugin before, the Dashboard asks first.

Busiest first, because the link a hundred people followed this month matters more than the one somebody mistyped an hour ago. Each row has a button that fills in a redirect for it, and one that keeps an address a bot keeps trying off the list for good. A page or category you delete is added the moment you delete it, with the older addresses its renames kept working, and offers where it lived: a retired product its own category, a child page its parent, one click from a redirect. Take a page back out of the bin and publish it, and its redirects return to every old address nothing else has taken since.

What is stored is which page was asked for, how often, and the page that linked to it — a page rather than a person. The list keeps itself to the size and the age you set.

/blog/* to /news/* sends /blog/hello to /news/hello and /blog/2019/june to /news/2019/june; leave the star off the destination and they all land on one page instead. A star only ever cuts at a slash, so /blog/* never catches /blogging-tips.

302 or 307 while something is away. And 410 for a page that is gone and is not coming back, such as a discontinued product: it says so plainly, where a redirect to the home page would pretend the page still exists.

A rule that points at itself is refused too, and caught again when it runs, because a site can move under a rule that was fine yesterday. The form keeps what you typed, so you fix the one part that was wrong, and in the block editor the Old addresses panel's refusal arrives as the editor's own notice.

Settings, import and export stay with administrators, and every redirect is held to the same refusals whoever writes it. Only those WordPress lets add scripts to a page can redirect to another site, so a shop manager cannot send your checkout elsewhere. A role editor plugin can give the capability, trrd_manage_redirects, to any other role. Until you choose, only administrators can, as before.

This is the single most common reason a redirect somebody wrote does not fire, and it is handled rather than explained.

It arrives as it was sent, with its spaces and accents. On by default, and a switch if you would rather it did not.

Preview shows what will arrive, what is already here, and what stays behind and why; Import then brings them over. A regular expression, a rule only for some visitors, or one switched off there is listed rather than copied. Two kinds arrive a little narrower, and the preview counts them: Rank Math's Starts With for a folder becomes a rule for that folder, and a plain Apache Redirect line a rule for its one address. Your own redirects are never overwritten, and nothing is changed in the other plugin. Rank Math's free version exports only server rules, so a pasted .htaccess or Nginx list is read too, with every line it could not read counted and the first of them listed by number. The Dashboard says so while the old plugin is still redirecting, until you dismiss the note.

Every row still goes through the same checks as one typed into the form, so nothing gets in that the screen would have refused.

Settings only: nothing you have written or collected, and never your licence key.

A request that matches nothing — which is nearly all of them — reaches the database not at all. A site with four redirects costs four numbers and no queries.

A site living at example.com/shop/ is understood: you write /old-page, which is the address you see in the admin, and the subfolder is handled.