Redirection

This page is now deprecated. Please visit the Redirection plugin website

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Features include:

  • Supports both WordPress-based and Apache-based redirections
  • 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
  • RSS feed for 404 errors
  • Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
  • Full logs for all redirected URLs
  • Create redirections based upon a URL, browser, referring site, or login status
  • Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
  • Full regular expression support
  • Fully localized
  • Export all redirections to CSV, XML, or Apache .htaccess files
  • Import Apache .htacces files

Redirection is available in the following languages:

If you can provide a language translation then please get in touch. A PO file is provided with the plugin to be used in translating with poEdit.

Installation

Installation is just like any WordPress plugin:

  • Download redirection.zip
  • Unzip
  • Upload to redirection directory to /wp-content/plugins on your server
  • Activate the plugin
  • Configure options from Manage – Redirection

Note that you must have a permalinks structure setup through WordPress.

You can find full details of installing a plugin on the plugin installation page.

Core Concepts

Redirection uses three core concepts:

  • Modules
  • Groups
  • Redirects

A module consists of many groups, and each group consists of many redirections. A module determines how the redirections will be used, and a group allows you to separate redirections into logical units. A redirection represents an action performed when a particular URL is accessed.

Don’t worry, there’s more to come!

Modules

At the most basic level, a module determines how redirections are implemented. There are three types of module:

  • WordPress
  • Apache
  • 404 errors

The WordPress module uses WordPress to implement redirections. This means it works for all permalink-enabled sites and so has the greatest compatibility.

The Apache module, as you would expect, uses Apache to implement redirections. This means that each redirection is written to an Apache .htaccess file, giving you better performance than the WordPress module, at the cost of less compatibility and less flexibility (some features, such as redirection statistics, are only available from the WordPress module).

Separate from these is the 404 error module. This uses Redirection to keep track of 404 errors.

Modules

Each module can be exported to CSV, XML, or an Apache .htaccess file. You can also view logs for each module via an RSS feed

WordPress Module

The WordPress module is the default module and provides the most features. The main disadvantage of this module is that each time a URL is redirected it requires WordPress to be loaded (contrast this to the Apache module where a redirection occurs before WordPress loads).

This module is configured as follows:

Wordpress Module

These options are detailed below:

  • Canonical – determine whether the www should be removed or added to your site URL.
  • Strip index – if enabled then any attempt to access a index.php, index.html, or index.asp file will cause an automatic redirection to the same URL, minus the index file.
  • Time Limit – sets a site-wide PHP timeout limit. Useful if something is timing out.
  • Error level – sets the PHP error reporting level. Useful for removing unwanted warnings, or for viewing hidden ones

Apache Module

Rather than using WordPress to provide redirections the Apache module writes data to an Apache .htaccess file. If you site supports these then this will give you the greatest performance, at the cost of losing a few items of functionality. For example, the Apache module provides no statistical information so it is not possible for the Redirection plugin to keep track of how many times a particular redirection has been used.

The module is configured as follows:

Apache Module

The options that differ from the WordPress module are:

  • Location – the location of the .htaccess file. The default will be your site directory
  • Ban IPs – prevents certain IPs from accessing your site
  • Allow IPs – allow certain IPs to access your site
  • Raw .htaccess – add custom rules
  • Site URL – an advanced option which allows you to set the site base URL

Note that when writing to a .htaccess file the Apache module will retain any existing non-WordPress data, so you can still add custom rules.

404 Module

This module is a little different to the others in that it is designed to record 404 errors. Rather than make this a general function, as in previous versions, the power of this module comes from the fact that redirections created inside it will be ignored from the 404 log. In other words, the module records all 404 errors except the specified URLs. Combined with the RSS feed this gives you a lot of options to keep track of errors on your site.

404 Errors

If you do want to ignore a 404 error (for example, you site may not have a favicon.ico and you don’t want this recorded) then you should create redirections as normal, but set the action to ‘Do nothing’. As for other modules you can create redirections based upon any action or rule, or matching a particular regular expression.

Groups

A group is a logical collection of redirected URLs. You can create as many groups as you wish, and groups can be re-ordered. URLs are matched based not only on the order in which they occur within a group, but the order in which groups occur within a module.

Group Edit

As well as allowing you to collect redirections together, you can also specify whether the redirections within a group are logged.

As an additional configuration option you can select which group an automatically generated URL is put in when a post/page or category is changed.

Using Redirection

The main idea behind Redirection is that you create several URLs that you want to redirect. These URLs are placed within a group, which in turn is placed within a module. The module determines how the URLs are redirected, and the group allows you to logically organise the URLs.

Each URL (or redirection) can be configured to behave in different ways. When creating a redirection there are several pieces of information you must provide:

  • Source URL – This is the original URL that you want to redirect somewhere else
  • Match – This tells the plugin how you want to match the source URL
  • Action – Determines what happens if the URL is matched
  • Regular expression – Tells the plugin that the source URL is a regular expression (i.e. a pattern that may match many URLs)
  • Target URL – most actions have a target URL. This is typically the URL that the user will be redirected to should the pattern match

Create

Note that items can be re-ordered and this may influence which redirection takes effect.

Matching URLs

Matching a URL is a key part of Redirection and consists of a source URL. This URL must exactly match a URL that you want to redirect. For example, your site has the page:

http://yoursite.com/oldpage/that/needs/redirecting/

The source URL for this is: /oldpage/that/needs/redirecting/. The source does not require your website address, and it is only possible to redirect a URL that exists on your website (you cannot redirect an external website, for example).

Advanced users can make use of regular expressions to reduce the number of redirections they need to create. A regular expression is basically a pattern that tells the plugin how to match. For example:

/(\d*)/(\d*)/(.*)

This pattern tells the plugin that you want to match a URL that looks like:

/2007/05/some-url/

That is, the (d*) indicates a number, and the (.*) a sequence of characters. Regular expressions are a complicated subject and this page will not attempt to give more than a passing overview of using them. If you do need more help then you should take a look at a regular expression website.

Remember that if the source URL is a regular expression then you must enable the regular expression option, otherwise Redirection will just treat you source URL as plain text.

In addition to the source URL you can also specify a match condition:

  • URL only – Only matches the URL (the majority of your redirections will use this)
  • URL and referrer – Matches a URL when the source and referring site matches (i.e. match the URL only when the user came from a certain website)
  • URL and login status – Matches a URL when the source and user’s login status matches (i.e. match the URL only when the user is logged in)
  • URL and user agent – Matches a URL when the source and user’s browser matches (i.e. when the user is using a particular type of web browser)

These special rules can be both positive and negative. For example, you can match a URL when the user is logged in (and be redirect to one URL), or when the user is not logged in (and be redirected to another URL). This makes it very easy to create custom rules where users are redirected if they are using a particular browser, or if they came from a particular website.

Actions

An action tells Redirection what to do when a source URL is matched:

  • Redirect to URL – The default case and the majority of your redirections will use this
  • Redirect to random post – An esoteric action that may be useful to some people
  • Pass through – An advanced option that allows you to masquerade one URL as another (i.e. when the source URL is accessed it actually displays the contents of another URL without the user being aware)
  • Error (404) – Causes a 404 error to be returned
  • Do nothing – A dummy option that can be used if you just want to track accesses to a URL

Configuration of rules and actions

Depending on the particular combination of action and match rule you may be required to provide further details for a redirection.

Basic URL redirection

You can specify which HTTP code is used to redirect a URL (301, 302, or 307):

Redirect Url

A couple of examples:

/blog/(.*) => /$1

This will match any URL that starts with /blog/, and will redirect it to the same URL but without /blog/. For example, /blog/2006/10/01/mypost will be redirected to /2006/10/01/mypost.

/2006/month_(\d+)/(.*) => /2006/$1/$2

This will match any URL that starts /2006/month_, and is then followed by a number. This will be redirected to the same URL, but without month_. For example, /2006/month_1/something will be redirected to /2006/1/something.

To replace a single dash in a URL with a space:

/tags/(.*?)-(.*?) => /tags/$1%20$2

Redirect to URL by matching user agent

This allows you to configure a redirection to occur when a specific browser (the user agent) is used:

Redirect User Agent

A set of pre-defined user agents is available from the drop-down menu or you can specify your own. The user agent match is always performed using a regular expression.

Two target URLs can be specified, one for if the user agent does match, and one for if it doesn’t match.

Redirect to URL by matching referrer

Similar to the user agent rule but this one looks at the referrer. That is, if a user follows a link from another site to yours, the original site is passed along by the browser (unless disabled) to your site so that you know where the user came from. Using this rule you can base your redirections upon this original site.

Redirect to URL by login status

This rule allows you to match a URL based upon the user’s WordPress login status. That is, if they are logged into your site.

Support & Bugs

Support and feature requests should be made through the Redirection support forum. You can contact me directly but I spend a very limited amount of time on direct support and you stand a better chance of being answered through the forum.

If you find the plugin useful then please do consider making a donation – it is appreciated and helps towards the maintenance of the plugin.

Thanks!

1,340 comments

  1. Hey how would you write the redirect for this example using regular expression?

    Source=”/videos/?SometextVariable=somenumberValue&sometextVariable=somenumberValue”
    Target=”videos.php?SometextVaraible=somenumberValue&sometextVariable=somenumberValue”

    Thanks

  2. John, problem added to the bug tracker.

    The other John: if your URLs have a consistent naming structure then you should be able to create a regular expression that will redirection everything from your old structure into the new one.

    Web dude, something like /videos/\?(.*) => videos.php?$1

  3. Hey,

    Thanks for the great plugin, however, after upgrading to the latest version now when I publish a new post on my blog all links to the homepage get redirected to the posts page. So going to http://www.bluntedpresents.co.uk/ would send you straight to the latest post, rather than showing the homepage. At this time the plugin has been de-aticvated. Any ideas? I’m using WordPress 2.6 and Mimbo Pro theme.

    Thanks in advance!

  4. Problem ‘fixed’. When I published the new post it created a “Modified Post” redirect from / to the latest post url… I deleted this redirect.

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  8. Is there anyway to use wordpress tags? Such as %post_id% and what not. I can’t seem to get it working. This would really help. Thanks!

    God bless!
    Lance

  9. Now that I think about this, I guess it wouldn’t be possible since it’s going to a 401, if would have no information on the post. Hmmm.

    God bless,
    Lance

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  22. Hello,
    What id I change manually change the permalink structure in WordPress?
    How can I autometically permanently (301) redirect the old post URLs to the new?

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  25. I sell text link ads on my page, if I use “Redirection” is the page still get the pagerank?? its important because it affected my earning.

    Thanks

    Regards,
    Sukabumi

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  29. 1. I changed all of my posts to pages. So now I am having an indexing problem with Google, as they are counting the previous posts as duplicate content even though the posts don’t exist anymore.

    2. Because my site accepts both www and non-www for my URL, I’ve been told that that too is causing an indexing problem as it constitutes canonicalization. I was told that I need to choose which one I want and do a 301.

    Does this plugin take care of this? If so, can you tell me how to fix this?

    Thanks!

  31. You can get redirection to redirect the URLs for your old posts to the new pages. Likewise you can force the site to have www or not have www

  32. […] тези промени на стар блог ще трябва да запишете този плъгин (Redirection Plugin) – с негова помощ старите permalinks ще водят към новите и […]

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  36. Hi,
    I’ve been meaning to ask this for quite sometime now.

    First of, your plugin is a godsend! It becomes one of my primary reasons of using wordpress when creating sites – because of your plugin. lol

    But i have a question. I noticed that some of links are being “clicked” by crawlers or bots and it gets registered as a “hit”.

    Is this normal?

    For example , I checked the log and a hit came from googlebot.

    Does this happen naturally? Or am I missing something?

    Thanks,
    John

  37. I love this plugin but need to ask a question. Currently the admin is the only person that can access the admin section. I would like to allow editors to do so. Is there something in the code I can quickly modify, or is there a capability I can add to Role Manager to allow this? (Capabilities, at least creating them, is totally new to me and outside what I currently understand.)

    Thanks for any help.
    Ed

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  40. John, yes, any request to a URL will register a hit and this includes bots that are scanning your site. Good bots, like Google, should pay attention to any redirection you put in place and will eventually update so they then request the new URL rather than the old one (this presumes that there are no links pointing to the old address)

    Ed, currently only an administrator is allowed to edit redirections.

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  42. Hi John,

    Thanks. I see it now.

    But would there be an option in future perhaps to add something “don’t register bot hits”?

    Cause one time I was like “Wow I got so many hits!”
    …then I noticed that they were just bots.lol.

    John

  43. It wouldn’t be a useful option and would lead to a substantial performance hit. It shouldn’t matter where a hit to an old URL is coming from – as long as it’s being hit then you want it to be redirected until whoever is hitting it realises the change and updates their index.

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  48. Is there an IIS solution for Clean Urls in WordPress? I’ve searched for a long time but it seems that even the Mod-Rewrite plugin for IIS won’t fix the issues. Help! Thanks!

  49. Colby, you need to edit the WordPress or Apache module – both have this option.

    Kurt, I’m not sure what the problem is you are referring to.

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  51. John,

    Thanks for the awesomeness that is redirection! Care to comment on the ideal file permissions for .htacess. I had it at 644 but this was not writable so now I’m at 666 …. is this ideal for accesibility / writing / security?

    Also noticed that if I go to logs or seaerchthere are none, but if I go to modules I see hits under the 404 group listing… if I click on the number of hits it then shows me the 404 logs… just a heads up.

  52. If you want Redirection to save to the .htaccess file then you need whatever permissions are necessary for the web server to do that. Typically this will be write permissions for the group/other, but it depends how your server is configured.

    Yes, logs and 404 logs are seperate things. If you are using the Apache module then Redirection cannot keep any logs, but it will still record 404 errors.

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  54. John,

    Have you considered adding an “Uninstall Redirection” function to the plugin?

    I’ve had Redirection on my site for quite some time now, but it stopped working quite a while ago. It,

    1) erased all the entries I had
    2) will not allow me to add NEW redirections

    But I’ve tried clearing it out myself and reinstalling, but still haven’t got it to work. And I have no idea what’s wrong.

    Any suggestions?

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  64. Okay well want more, why did I deactivate this plugin and then had major htaccess file issues that wouldn’t let my WordPress install connect to the database and the only way I could fix it was by deleting the plugin from the plug in directory? Also I looked in the options page and there was nothing clearly stated about changing that. Why would you make that a default option? That seems to me like something that would be better served if someone could turn it on and not do it when the first install the plugin.

  65. Erik, see the options page ‘URL monitoring’ for the ability to configure URL monitoring. This is enabled by default as it is generally beneficial to everyone. It does not automatically redirect to the latest post but auto-adds a redirection when a post URL changes.

    The plugin will make no modifications to your .htaccess file unless you configure it to do so by adding an Apache module. Modifications to your .htaccess will not cause your database to become unavailable.

  67. John, when you’ve created a redirection you can edit it and configure it further (including redirection type)

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  69. With the new 2.0.8 update, I can no longer create redirects. I have not changed anything, and 2.0.7 was working fine.

  70. The 2.0.8 update just included a minor fix when deleting logs – there is nothing that should have affected how anything else works.

  71. Hi John, I’m not doubting you, but I reinstalled 2.0.7 and it works just fine. So if it’s not the 2.0.8 release, I don’t know what it is!

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  74. I’m not doubting the problem! From experience I find that if I wait a short period then most people report that the problem disappeared. Right now no one else has reported any similar issues so I would make sure that the plugin was correctly updated and also check that you’ve cleared your browser cache – it’s possible that something like this may be interfering. Also, if you are using Google Gears to speed up your site then disable that.

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  77. I found the setting that you were talking about. I don’t know why you have this on by default, we are using WordPress in an CMS style app, and don’t want any redirected to the latest post but have them stay on the static page it’s set to. And this was a hard setting to find and change and wasn’t were you said it would be.

    When we moved to WordPress from our old site there was a number of links that needed to get moved and this is a nice plug into handle that. But I think you may want to rethink some of the default settings.

  78. Erik, as I said before, the setting does not redirect to the latest post. It redirects the old URL of a post to a new URL, if that post’s URL changes. Doing this is very important. The setting is on the Redirection options page.

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  84. John i recently downloaded your awesom developed plugin and activated it.

    I am using wordpress 2.3.3 and IE 7

    But it is not letting me to add any redirections. No matter i add any url it just showing me “You have no redirections.”

    I am trying as :

    Source URL: /eyewear-blog/ray-ban-sunglasses-declared-retro-comeback-of-the-summer/
    Target URL: /eyewear-blog/ray-ban-sunglasses-retro-comeback
    Match : URL only
    Action : Redirect to URL

    Is there any specifix way to add redirections. Plz help me in figure out.

    Thanks in Advance.

  85. Hi,

    I recently had to deactivate your plugin as it was causing a redirection loop in a post where I had added a new category to (which changed the permalink) – I decided that I didn’t want that category, so I unchecked it.

    Well, after that when I tried to pull up the post, it just looped infinitely through both permalinks.

    After I deactivated your plugin it returned to normal.

    Any thoughts?

    Thanks!

  86. I understand what you are saying it doing. But I’m saying that when someone is using WordPress as a CMS system they wouldn’t want that option by default. Thus I’m saying that should be something that someone can decide to turn on, because I can see it’s usefulness. Since there is no clear way to disable that it would make people turn away when it starts to cause problems with there CMS site. We use our WordPress as a CMS, as I said in other post, and we use the blog posting system for press releases. So why would we want all incoming traffic redirection to the latest press release?

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  88. Erik, you haven’t read my comment properly. The option does not redirect to the latest post. That would indeed be a useless feature an no one would want that whether using WordPress as a blog or a CMS. The function redirects an old URL to a new URL when a URL is changed. That is a very important feature and one that WordPress itself does. The option to do this is clearly labelled in the interface and can be easily disabled.

    Jeferson, if you can match a pattern then you can remove part of a URL. For example, /tag/(.*) => /$1 would remove the ‘tag’ from all URLs.

    SDK, you’ll need to delete the redirection from the interface

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  90. Thanks for the quick reply, John. So, if I delete the plugin and then upload again it should work? Just want to make sure…

  93. Dave, delete the plugin directory.

    SDK, you don’t need to delete the plugin just the redirection that is causing the loop (i.e. find the URL that is looping in the Redirection interface and delete it)

    Sameer & Kavin, you’ll need to provide some more details about your setup as I cannot recreate any problem adding redirections.

  94. Thanks for developing a wonderful plugin. I used many plugins offered in the wordpress directory. I was so confused and none of them worked well for me. This plugin has more features than compared to the other plugins.
    Great work!

  95. Hi John,

    I’m having the same problem as Kavin. Former version of Redirect was working fine. I was very happy with it. Since I upgraded to the new version I keep adding redirects but they don’t get saved. Please advise.

    Thanks

  96. I am able to redirect the old domain homepage to the new domain, but how do I redirect specific posts and pages from the old domain to the new one?

  97. To all the people reporting problems with adding redirections, please please can you provide more details? It’s not particularly useful to read the same problem reported five times, especially when I’ve repeatedly stated I cannot reproduce it. The fastest way for me to locate an issue is to have all the information to hand – server environment, web browser, wordpress version etc. If you can provide a login to a site exhibiting the problem with the details of the steps to reproduce it then it will really save me a lot of time.

  98. hi,

    i miss the option “Globally redirect unknown 404 errors” in the new version of the redirection plugin

    is there a way to config this in the version 2.0.9

    thanks

    thomas

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