How To Redirect URL in Your Blog

You wrote a killer article and you received many, many links that are linking to your article. For some reason, you wanted to change the permalink. But if you changed it, the links to your blog will be broken

This is when a wordpress plugin, called ‘Redirection’, comes handy.

Redirection let you redirect any URL in your blog to another site, or to any other page in your blog.

With redirection, you can redirect the visitors who visits the original permalink to the new one, so that your visitors won’t end up in a 404 page.

How to use it

To get to where you can set up redirections, for wordpress 2.6 users, go to Manage >> Redirection. For wordpress 2.7 users, go to Tools >> Redirection.

It is very simple to set up a redirection.

First, you type in the source URL, the URL that needs redirection (/twitter). Simply type a slash, and then the URL.

Then, type in the target URL, the URL that your visitors would be redirected to (http://twitter.com/Gloson).

People who visit ‘https://glosonblog.com/twitter’ will be redirected to ‘http://twitter.com/Gloson’.

If you want ‘/twitter’ to redirect to one of your blog posts, type in the target URL, ‘/your-blog-post’.

To finish creating the redirection, click ‘Add Redirection’.

The plugin will also show you how many times the URL has been accessed. Cool eh?

Important:
It is best if you create two versions of the source URL (one with a slash ‘/’ and one without) because

although https://glosonblog.com/twitter redirects to http://twitter.com/Gloson,
https://glosonblog.com/twitter/ (with a slash) won’t. So, you need to create another redirection (type ‘/twitter/’ in the source URL) so that the people who visits the URL with a slash would be redirected, too.

How it is useful

404 pages
Like the story I told above, if many blogs are linking to one of your posts and you have changed the permalink, you can set up a redirection so that the people who visits that link will be redirected to the right page and not a 404 page.

Affiliate links
For Internet marketers who would like to hide affiliate links, this plugin comes in handy. Simply redirect your visitors to your affiliate link from a source URL like this, ‘/go/product-1’ or something like that.

URL Shortening
This is useful for long URL’s that are hard to remember. For example, you can’t remember that long URL to your facebook profile. You could use your blog for redirection. For example, https://glosonblog.com/facebook redirects to my facebook profile.

I find this plugin handy and useful. Oh, and to download the plugin and read more about it, click here.