Ensuring that your website’s URLs are displaying and operating correctly is imperative as broken links and misdirected traffic can have a serious negative effect on both user experience and SEO. When moving URLs (websites, pages, posts and other content types) from an original to a new source, redirection is vital for steering both site viewers and search engines in the right direction.

In the event that no redirect has been set up for a web element (site, page or post), your site user will be met with an error message while browsing your site. They will more than likely leave your website, and possibly not return. In a similar vein, a search engine will also have no context over which web element to return in a search query.

Note: As best practice, it’s not advised to update and move URLs haphazardly. Redirects should only be set up when absolutely necessary.

The series of numeric codes are HTTP response status codes, and they signal a redirect of sorts. There are a vast number of HTTP response codes, the redirection specific codes consist of three digits and are prefixed with the number 3. If you ever stumble across ‘3XX’ or ‘30X’ when reading about websites, servers and such, it’s more than likely referring to one of the several HTTP response status codes. Each one of these codes is used for different redirection tactics and have different properties. Over time, and with the version update from HTTP/1.0 to HTTP/1.1, these response codes have evolved and split in order to serve a myriad of different purposes (largely taking browser caching as well as request methods POST / GET into account). At present, there are nine redirection status codes (300 – 308).

Without delving into too much detail about the redirect codes, the most important ones are 301 and 302. These have long been the most trusted methods for moving both permanent and temporary URLs respectively. Redirect codes 303 and 307 (temporary) and 308 (permanent) carry significance in their own regard, but not for the purpose of this post, and should only be used with finite knowledge in relation to the code-specific request methods.

Use a 301 redirect if:

• You would like to move your web domain.
• You would like to steer traffic to a new website, page or post from the original source.
• There is a broken URL on your website.

Use a 302 redirect if:

• You are updating a specific web page and want to divert traffic to a new page temporarily.
• You are split testing either design, content or functional aspects (often for client decision and approval).
• You are setting up an online campaign or landing page.

Despite the number of temporary redirects, the 302 is the most widely accepted option as it provides compatibility for browsers that don’t support HTTP/1.1, whereas 303 and 307 are used explicitly for HTTP/1.1 browsers.

Once a new WordPress installation is complete, a file – .htaccess – is, in most cases, automatically added to the root folder of a website. On some occasions, there is no .htaccess file, but one can easily be created by using a text editor or IDE (Brackets or Sublime) and then transferred to the root folder via FTP.

The .htaccess file gets read before the index.php file (which begins to load the full WordPress file package to display a website). In a very generalized sense, the .htaccess file is a config file that is somewhat predominantly focused on the functions of the server and can handle a series of requests including rewrites for redirects.

Remember to back up this file before making any changes. The code in the .htaccess file is extremely sensitive, and one incorrect character can throw an entire website off.

To edit your .htaccess file you will need to login to your server using an FTP client (such as FileZilla or CyberDuck). Some hosts allow for onsite file editing via the File Manager (or similarly named) console. Once you have located the .htaccess file in the root folder of your website, the file should present content that looks like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]


# END WordPress

# BEGIN 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /old-page-name/ https://www.website.com/new-page-name/
# END 301 Redirects

# BEGIN 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /old-page/ https://www.website.com/new-page/
Redirect 301 /old-page-2/ https://www.website.com/new-page-2/
Redirect 301 /old-post/ https://www.website.com/new-post/
# END 301 Redirects

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain\.com$ [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.olddomain\.com$
  RewriteRule (.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# BEGIN 302 Redirects
Redirect 302 /old-post/ https://www.yourwebsite.com/new-post/
# END 302 Redirects

• Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
• Redirection
• Safe Redirect Manager (Multisite compatible)
• Simple 301 Redirects
• Yoast SEO Premium (incudes Redirect Manager)

Continuing the trend of redirection, this blog post will be followed with a post that both explains the 404 HTTP response status and includes a short tutorial on how to set up a 404 page for your Divi website.

Thanks for reading!