Best Redirect Plugins for Wordpress

If you are a developer or a website owner, you must have come through situations that forced you to redirect a URL on your website to another page. If you have not yet come across this, you will sooner or later.

Most of the times, this need arises from different requirements such as when:

We migrate WordPress websites
There are broken links
We want to redirect 404 pages to a certain page
There is a change of the domain name and you want to redirect to the new domain name
Spam registrations and other page errors

In all these cases, the easiest way to redirect to a new page is by using a WordPress plugin.

These plugins will give you a way to do so without even writing a single line of code. It means that you can do this by yourself even if you do not have any web development skills.

In this post, we are going to discuss the best redirect plugins for WordPress.

Redirect Manager in Yoast SEO Premium

Redirect Manager is a popular WordPress plugin that comes with Yoast SEO premium. It is one of the best plugins we have today for creating redirects on WordPress websites. It comes with amazing features especially its ability to automatically create redirects when you change the URL of a page or a post. With this plugin, you can create the following redirects;

301 – Moved permanently
302 – Found
307 – Temporary redirect
410 – Content deleted
451 – Content unavailable for legal reasons

When you delete a page or a post, the Redirect Manager plugin will ask you immediately what you would like to do with the old URL. It will then give you a choice to either redirect to a new URL or make it serve as a 410 content deleted header.

Furthermore, this plugin allows you to create REGEX redirects – you are able to redirect a group of URLs that have a certain keyword with just one redirect.

You can also import or export all your redirects to a CSV file giving you a chance to have an overview of them all. This is one of the best redirect plugins we have today.

Price: $ 89

Redirection

Redirection is a popular WordPress redirection plugin developed over ten years ago and with over one million active installs at the time of writing this post. The developers claim that it is strong enough to be used on any size website – from just a few redirects to thousands of them.

It supports regular expressions allowing you to create redirect patterns that can match any number of URLs.

Just like the Redirect Manager above, the Redirection plugin monitors pages and posts to automatically create redirects when there is a permalink change.

One of the most interesting things I found with this plugin is the ability to create redirects based on conditions such as browser conditions (redirecting if a user is using a certain browser), login status (redirecting if the user is either logged in or logged out) and referrer (redirecting if the user clicked on the link from another page).

Redirection also allows you to view all the information about the redirects taking place on your website. You get to see the browser they are using, information about the visitor and even the referrer. You can also export logs into a CSV for external analysis.

Price: Free

Safe Redirect Manager

Safe Redirects Manager is another WordPress plugin that will give you an easy way to create redirects for your website.

This plugin stores redirects as Custom Post Types – something they claim it makes your website scalable and data portable. It is a well-developed plugin that can be used on any size website, from the smallest to the largest without breaking down or causing issues.

This plugin is easy and straight forward to use. Each of its redirects come with a few fields that you can use to set up your redirects. This makes the plugin scalable and allows you to set up the exact redirect you are looking for. It also allows you to use regular expressions in your redirects.

If you have URLs following a certain pattern, you can use wildcards on the Redirect From field to make sure that all the URLs that follow that pattern will redirect to the same URL.

For example, if your “Redirect From” is /redirect/*, your “Redirect To” is http://mynewredirect.com/*, and the requested path is /redirect/post, the user would be redirected to http://mynewredirect.com/post.

Price: Free

Easy HTTPS Redirection (SSL)

Easy HTTPS Redirection plugin only works on websites that have an SSL certificate installed. Make sure you have installed the certificate before using this plugin. It allows you to force search engines to index the HTTPS version of all the web pages on your website. This means that if someone tried to access the HTTP version of the website – what you had before installing an SSL certificate – they will be automatically redirected to the HTTPS version.

Furthermore, you can choose to have the entire website, with all pages, be redirected to the HTTPS version of the website or choose just a few pages to be redirected. The plugin has some amazing features, including but not limited to;

Auto redirecting the entire domain name.
Auto redirecting a number of pages on your website.
Forcing load static files such as CSS, js, and images using an HTTPS URL.

Price: Free

Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin

Quick Page/Post Redirect plugin is an amazing WordPress redirect plugin that comes with two redirect functionalities;

The Quick Redirects
Individual Redirects

Quick Redirects: There are redirects that are easy to quick to add. It does not require you to have a page or post set up to add a redirect. All you need to do is just adding the request URL and the destination URL and leave the rest of the work to the plugin. This is the type of redirect you will need when you want to redirect old URLs to new URLs to avoid 404 errors, fix typos on the original URL, and redirecting URLs from an old site to the new site.

Individual Redirects: Individual redirects are created for existing pages and posts. It adds an option meta box when creating individual redirects that allow you to specify the redirection type – meta, 301 or 302 – and location. You can use this plugin to redirect a certain page(s) to a different URL, for duplicate posts and even menu items.

This is an easy to use plugin and will get you all the needs you have for your redirection requirements.

Price: Free

WP 404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post

WP 404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post is one of the best redirection WordPress plugins for 404 WordPress redirection. It is very easy to install and use – and automatically redirects pages to avoid the 404 not found error.

That sounds interesting, right? The plugin automatically redirects 404 pages and posts to similar pages and/or posts.

It does this from the Title, Post Types and Taxonomies used when creating the posts and pages. If the plugin cannot find anything similar to the requested post, the users when then be redirected to the homepage of your website or a custom URL that you have assigned for this purpose.

However, if all those conditions fail, the plugin will redirect site visitors to the default 404 page.

This plugin also comes with some amazing features such as;

Ability to choose the redirection HTTP header status – 301 and 302 headers.
Exclusion of certain post types, taxonomies, and posts based on custom post meta and/or term meta from possible redirections.

Price: Free

404 to 301 – Redirect, Log and Notify 404 Errors

If you own a website and want to get rid of 404 errors, this is one of the best plugins to get the job done for you.

This plugin comes with a log manager that notifies you via email alerts – hourly, twice daily, daily, twice weekly, weekly – about virtually everything that is going on on your site.

You can even add more than one email accounts that you want to logs sent to. With this, you can be sure to never miss a thing about your website with regard to 404-page error reporting.

The plugin, though, works in a similar manner as the other plugins we have discussed in redirecting 404 error pages. It redirects all 404 errors to any page that the website owner sets using 301, 302 or 307 status.

Price: Free

Conclusion

There are tons of plugins that you can use to create redirects on your WordPress website, but the above plugins are the best at getting the job done for you. They are all easy to use and come with extra features to make sure that you get the exact redirect that you are looking for.

Do you have any experience – good or bad – using any of these or any other plugin? Share it with us in the comment section.