6 December 2023
10 Best WordPress Redirect Plugins for Managing Broken Links
Have you ever clicked on a link only to be met with the dead ‘404 – Page Not Found’ error?
Broken links are not only annoying for users, but they can significantly harm your website’s SEO and credibility.
The good news is with the right WordPress redirect plugin, managing these pesky broken links becomes a breeze.
In this article, we’ll explore the best WordPress redirect plugins that effortlessly guide visitors to the right content, maintain your site’s SEO health, and ensure a seamless user experience.
What Is a Redirect in WordPress?
In WordPress, a redirect is a method used to send users and search engines from one URL to another. Suppose a page or post on your site has moved or no longer exists. In that case, a redirect ensures visitors are automatically taken to a new, relevant page instead of throwing a ‘404 Page Not Found’ error.
There are several types of redirects in WordPress, with the most common being:
- 301 Redirect: A permanent redirect that signals to search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new URL.
- 302 Redirect: A temporary redirect indicating that the content has moved temporarily and may revert to the original URL in the future.
- 307 Redirect: Another type of temporary redirect used in specific technical scenarios, similar to a 302 redirect.
Why You Need a Redirect Plugin?
A redirect plugin automates the redirection process, ensuring your website remains in excellent condition.
Broken links can not only damage your site’s search engine rankings but also negatively affect the experience of your visitors. Clicking on a broken link is like following your GPS to a dead end: irritating and time-consuming. You don’t want it to happen to your website visitors.
Regularly scanning your website for broken links is essential, especially when migrating your site to WordPress. It is also important when you changing your page URL structures to remove subfolders.
Manually finding and fixing broken links is time-consuming and prone to error. Fortunately, redirect plugins can help you automate and streamline this process.
Below, we’ve compiled a list of top redirect plugins for your WordPress website designed to simplify this crucial task.
Top Redirect Plugins for WordPress
While WordPress lacks out-of-the-box functionality for detecting and replacing broken links, there is a large number of WordPress plugins available for that purpose.
1. Redirection
Redirection is one of the best free WordPress redirect plugins and an essential plugin for any WordPress site. This plugin lets you set up many redirects, including 301, 302, 303, 304, 308, and more.
Furthermore, it offers a redirect manager to create redirect rules with query parameters. Setting up and updating redirects in bulk is also easy.
Furthermore, this plugin provides conditional redirection based on conditions such as browser, referrer, and IP address. It keeps track of all redirects on your site, including those that were not put up by Redirection, to help you handle 301 redirects in WordPress more effectively.
It also supports full permalink structure migrations.
Overall, it is one of the feature-rich free WordPress plugins for your website.
Price: Free.
2. 301 Redirects
301 Redirects, like Redirection, is a free and popular plugin. As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to create 301 redirects and 302 and 307 redirects. You can redirect older URLs to other similar articles based on title, custom post type, categories, etc, or create a new custom URL.
Additionally, it has a 404 error log that might help you keep track of error pages. As a result, you won’t have to do a manual audit every time or check every page to ensure it’s still live. When the plugin discovers 404 pages, you can redirect them to the right location.
It also has a bulk redirect tool that allows you to manage hundreds of redirects at once. This is very handy if you want to export all of your site’s URLs, change them all at once, and then re-import them.
Price: Free, with a premium version, starts from $49 lifetime.
3. Safe Redirect Manager
Next on our list of the best redirect plugins for WordPress is Safe Redirect Manager. Using this plugin, you can effortlessly redirect any pages and posts to new URLs using HTTP status codes such as 302 and 301. The best part about this plugin is that it allows you to set up redirects within the post itself. There is no need to go to the plugin’s settings within your WordPress admin dashboard.
Furthermore, despite being free, it is versatile enough to handle high traffic volumes. With support for wildcard and REGEX redirects, this WordPress redirect plugin allows you to automate redirection based on specific paths.
Additionally, it allows up to 1,000 redirects by default. However, you can increase the limit by using the srm_max_redirects PHP filter.
Price: Free.
4. Rank Math
Rank Math is a popular free WordPress SEO plugin that helps you improve your WordPress SEO and increase your website traffic.
As an SEO toolkit, this WordPress plugin also offers a redirection feature. The advanced redirection manager supports 301, 302, 307, 410, and 451 redirects based on different conditions. Using the bulk redirect setting speeds up the process.
If you enable the 404 monitor setting, Rank Math SEO will automatically scan your WordPress website for 404 issues. This SEO tool keeps track of the number of visits to each page, allowing you to prioritize fixes based on their impact on the entire website.
Redirections can be deactivated and reactivated with a single click. You can also automate the process by specifying start and finish dates.
Learn more in our complete Rank Math review.
Price: Free, with a premium version, starting from $4.92/month + VAT.
5. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO doesn’t need any introduction. It is a popular SEO plugin among WordPress users, and for a good reason. We’ve talked about how to use Yoast SEO in the past, and it’s still the tool we use to optimize our blog content.
If you use the Yoast SEO premium version, you get access to a lot more tools that we didn’t have time to cover in the link mentioned above, such as a redirect manager. This tool allows you to create new redirects or have Yoast SEO handle it for you when you delete or move a page.
Yoast SEOs redirect manager supports multiple types of redirection, including 301, 302, and 307.
Additionally, you can also set two uncommon HTTP status codes, 410 and 451. The 410 code informs search engines that a page has been removed permanently and that they should de-index it. The 451 code indicates that a page is inaccessible due to legal issues.
Price: Free, with a premium version, costs $99 per year.
6. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
Like Rank Math and Yoast SEO, another WordPress redirect plugin is All in One SEO (AIOSEO). It has a free version that includes everything you need to optimize your website for SEO, as well as a premium version that includes a comprehensive redirection manager.
With the redirection manager, you can quickly manage 301 redirects, track 404 issues, and fix dead links. Managing your redirects is as simple as copying your old and target URLs into the proper sections.
You may even automatically redirect visitors and search engines to your new content if you remove or change a URL. All-in-One SEO also allows you to redirect multiple URLs to the same destination URL and keeps track of all redirects and 404s on your site.
Price: Free, with a premium version, costs $49.50 per year.
7. 404 to 301
Next on our list is 404 to 301, a WordPress plugin that assists website owners in managing 404 issues on their websites. The plugin uses a 301 redirect to automatically redirect the user to a relevant page on the website. This ensures that the user is sent to a useful page and that broken links do not have a negative impact on the website’s SEO.
The plugin also logs all 404 errors and notifies the website owner, allowing them to fix broken links.
In addition to redirecting users and logging errors, 404 to 301 allows users to configure custom redirects for specific URLs. This is helpful for website owners who have changed the structure of their site and need to redirect old URLs to new ones.
Price: Free.
8. Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
As the name suggests, this plugin focuses on quickly setting up redirects for post and page content.
Everything about this plugin is simple to use, and best of all, it is free.
One of the most notable aspects of this plugin is the ability to create redirects for pages that do not yet exist. That’s true; you can create a redirect even if you haven’t produced the content yet.
Price: Free.
Get Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
9. SEO Redirection Plugin
SEO Redirection is an excellent redirect plugin for WordPress. It allows you to set up and manage 301 redirects on your WordPress website. By connecting with Google Search Console, the plugin help you in finding and fixing 404 and soft 404 errors.
When you alter a post’s URL, the SEO Redirection Plugin automatically creates a 301 redirect. It features an advanced control panel that allows you to redirect folders, check logs, add regular expressions, select redirection methods, and many other things.
Price: Free, with a premium version, starting from $29 per year.
10. Broken Link Checker
Last but not least on our list is Broken Link Checker. We know what you’re thinking: the Broken Link Checker doesn’t really create redirects in WordPress. You are 100% right. However, it does monitor them, making it an excellent tool to use with a dedicated redirection tool.
The plugin is free to use, and it will automatically scan your website after installation. The time it takes to perform the scan depends on the size of the website, but in most situations, it is a fairly quick process.
Following the scan, you will be provided with a comprehensive list of everything that is broken on your website. This includes URLs, images, and redirects themselves. Not only does this assist you in identifying a redirect issue, but it also shows URLs that might need one.
Again, this cannot do a redirect, but it is a useful tool to have alongside an advanced redirection plugin.
Price: Free.
Conclusion
Choosing the right WordPress redirect plugin is essential for efficiently managing broken links and providing a seamless user experience on your website.
Each of the plugins above we’ve explored offers unique features, from simple redirect functionalities to advanced options like bulk redirection and 404 error monitoring.
Whether you’re looking to improve your site’s SEO, streamline your redirect process, or just keep your site navigation error-free, there’s a plugin for that.
Remember, maintaining a healthy link structure is not just about fixing what’s broken. It’s about providing a smooth, uninterrupted route for your visitors and preserving your site’s search engine credibility.
With these top WordPress redirect plugins, you’re well-equipped to handle any redirection challenges your site might face.
We hope this article helped you find the best redirection tool to manage your website redirects.
For more, check out these other helpful resources:
- 30 Best Free WordPress Plugins for Every Website
- 10 Best WordPress SMTP Plugins for Improve Email Delivery
- 6 Best Cookie Consent Plugins for WordPress
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