How to Use the WordPress Redirection Plugin When Moving Site to a New Domain or Directory
On Monday I discussed the Update URL’s plugin that will update the image and internal links on your WordPress site when you move it to a new domain or directory location.
You also want to make sure that your visitors don’t get lost and get 404 errors when they access your site or follow bookmarks to it. In other words you don’t want to lose or confuse visitors who are still coming to your site via the old URL.
URL redirection can be done via the .htaccess file but for non-techie types and those of us who are easily confused (me) the Redirection Plugin is a great alternative.
- Install and activate the plugin
- Go to Tools > Redirection
- You will see a screen that looks like this
- In the source URL field, put the original URL of the website. For example, if you are moving your site to the root directory from the blog subdirectory, you would put yourdomain.com/blog
- In the target URL field, put the new URL – yourdomain.com
- Click on the Add Redirection button
- As long as you are using the same permalink structure under Settings > Permalinks, this one Redirection will take care of all your blog posts and pages.
- Sometimes when moving a site the content is reorganized. For example, if you had a page for Writing Services, Resume Services, etc and on the new site you made a page called Services and made Writing and Resume child pages of services that the URL would change. You can deal with this through the redirection plugin as well. For example, yourdomain.com/writing-services is now yourdomain.com/services/writing. You can put the first URL in the source field and the second in the target field.
- You can test that it is working properly but putting the source URL into your browser. You should be automagically redirected to the new URL
It’s a great plugin and I’ve found it really useful for sites that are being moved to new domains and directories. Do you think you would use this?
photo credit: purplemattfish
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August 5, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Nice find ! Tons of people ask how to move a site to the root and it’s tough trying to give them a blow by blow via email or on a help forum.
Now I can direct them here to this article.
I wish this was around back when I used to stumble through the process. Had a lot of white screens in my past.
Thanks for sharing.
August 6, 2010 at 7:46 am
Hi Harold – A number of my articles have been written because I was tired of writing up the instructions – now I just include the link to the article ;-)
August 5, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Thank you for the tips!
.-= vered´s last blog ..My Reasons for Going Gray =-.
August 6, 2010 at 7:46 am
Hi Vered – Thanks!
August 6, 2010 at 3:26 am
Nice plugin Kim, I going to save this post in my memory file for the future when we going to move the site.
August 6, 2010 at 7:46 am
Hi Marbella – Great! I’m glad it helps.
August 9, 2010 at 10:47 am
Hey Kim
Suppose I move 3 posts from site A–> B
What do you suggest will it be a good idea to do it using this redirection plugin??
.-= Harsh Agrawal´s last blog ..Hostgator Maximum Discount and 1 month Free Hosting- August 2010 =-.
August 10, 2010 at 6:58 am
Hi Harsh – I would put the full url for each post into the redirection settings. If the posts are also going to be on the original site, I would put a link in them to the new location.
March 4, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Your blog post here popped up in Google as I tried to find explanations how to use the plugin. I’ve activated it and the dashboard is anything but user intuitive.
How do I use it??
Ari Herzog´s last post ..17 Plugins to Improve Your WordPress Blog
March 5, 2011 at 10:50 am
Hi Ari,
You had a redirection for each URL. Source url is the old one and target url is the new one. For example
ari.com/services – source url
ari2.com/services2 – target url
You add each one. One thing confused me is after you save, the one you just added is still filled in – you can just type over that to save the 2nd one.
April 27, 2011 at 5:41 am
Hi,
Thanks for sharing this tutorial. Recently I am having more trouble on my webmasters tools on crawling 404 error but I am not well aware of using such redirection plugin and how to make 301 redirect. That’s why I am thanking you for sharing this tutorial. Now all my 404 error is redirect to my site :D
Cheers!
April 29, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Hi Edille – I’m glad the article helped :-)
April 30, 2011 at 8:04 pm
will it effect google page rank……?
May 2, 2011 at 12:42 pm
It can. Google needs to re-index the new links and it can take 3-6 months to get back to where you were. It’s helpful to submit an updated site map to Webmaster Tools.
August 23, 2011 at 1:53 pm
I agree with Ari that this plug-in is not intuitive. I did find that the developer put some instructions on his Giraffe website but I’m still unclear.
I have launched a website on WordPress that was on a different platform. The domain name has not changed but each of the page names has. Because the other site had numbers and ended in html in each URL and the current site has the category/post permalink.
I have a list of 30 of these types of redirects to add to the Redirection Plug-in. Where and how do I do it?
Also, if this plug-in is installed, it says it “automatically” redirects a post URL change? In other words if someone realizes they should have named a post differently in the URL – it was indexed and RANKED by Google already in 2 hours – would you change it? Right now it is a very timely post. Would it be better to wait and change it after the timeliness dies down (6 months) or do it now?
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By the way, I did a redirection from /blog to the .com a year ago and now I think it is the very rare circumstance that justifies changing the root of a mature blog. In case you didn’t know, when you buy a “vanity” URL for Posterous.com, it is accomplished by redirects – not worth it. I should have kept my name.posterous.
August 27, 2011 at 8:08 am
Hi Linda – You would add the old url to the source url field and the new one to the target url.
I’m not sure if I would change the URL on a popular post or not – that’s a tough one. Google should pick up the change quickly and if it’s redirected it shouldn’t be too much a problem.