Plugin review: Redirection

Redirection by John Godley.

I used to have one website for my writing projects — tylertork.com. Then I split it out into two — the old one for fiction writing, and this new one for my technical non-fiction. The old site contained some articles about web development, so I moved them over. Same content, but different URL.

But what happens if people have created links to that content elsewhere in the Internet? Links are precious–they boost SEO and, you know, let people find your stuff so they visit your website and see the messages you want them to see.

(By the way: buy my book!)

We now return you to your regular programming. Anyway, if you move a page — even if you move it to a different location on the same website — be sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so if someone follows a link to where the page was, they get redirected to where the page is now. This plugin does exactly that.

In its dashboard screen (Tools > Redirection), you can enter a list of old URLs and their corresponding new URLs, and it’s taken care of.

For this to work, you need to still have a website on the old domain. If you wanted to shut down the old site, you still have to own the old domain, or you can’t control what happens when people try to go there. If that is the situation, if you’re getting rid of the old site, you don’t need this plugin. There are other ways to manage redirection in that case, which your hosting provider can show you. The plugin is what you need if you still want to have the old site as a distinct entity, but some pages have moved, either within the same site or elsewhere.