How to Create a Permanent 301 Redirect in WordPress

Let's talk a little bit about 301 redirects. You will find out what it is good to have a 301 redirect set up for, what redirects are for, and what its meaning and impact is on your website.

What is a 301 redirect

Imagine that you create an article on your website. Then, for some reason, the article is removed either by mistake or intentionally. If the article has already been indexed to a search engine such as Google and appears in search results, its deletion will take effect too late and the visitor will see your blank page without content in the search results after clicking on the result. We basically lost such a visitor unconditionally thanks to the deletion of the article, because he was shown a blank page with an error. Thanks to the plugin I mention in this article, you can easily avoid this unpleasant problem. Install the plugin and the visitor will no longer see a blank page, but your error message with your website. You don't just see a blank page. Your entire website will be displayed with an error message and that's the difference! Your page will notify you of missing content and your template will be displayed with all the essentials. The visitor has a chance to see your website and look around for other content. After all, what a page without a plugin looks like is illustrated in the image in this article. You won't even see your potential ads, and you don't want that.

What is the significance and impact of this

The 301 redirect serves primarily to prevent visitors from clicking from searching to no longer existing parts of the website. If you don't have a 301 redirect set up, you'll only see a blank page with no alternate content with an error message. From the point of view of SEO (search engine optimization), this is a serious mistake, because you are not profiting from the already non-existent subpages of the site. Blank pages are harmful and do not make a good impression of the page from search engines at all. Such sites will not occupy the best positions for specific queries and thus you will not get as much traffic as you could possibly achieve with this rule.

Download, install, apply and you're done! You can find it in every WordPress administration immediately after logging in in the category »Plugins« and »Plugin installation« under the name »301 Redirects – Easy Redirect Manager«.