Cornershop’s preferred tool for managing redirects is called “Redirection” under the Tools menu in your site. We install this plugin on all of our site builds to make it easier for our team and yours to add redirects.
Some situations when you might need to add redirects:
A page or post has been removed from your site, and the original link now returns a 404 error.
You’ve updated a page slug, but there are still references to the old slug in online content.
You want to create a short, easy to remember URL that will redirect to a longer URL.
You’re cleaning up content, and you want to make sure old posts redirect to new, updated posts.
Read the full Redirection plugin documentation.
Add a Redirect
Step 1. Hover over the Tools menu in your WP Admin, then click the option for Redirection.
Step 2. Click “Add New” at the top of the page.
Step 3. Copy and paste the first URL you want to redirect FROM (the original URL that might no longer work!) into the Source URL field:
You’ll use a “relative URL”, which means you’re pasting everything in the URL that comes after your domain. Read more about relative URLs.
Step 4. Next, add the NEW url in the Target URL field:
This URL does not need to be relative. It doesn’t even need to be on your domain! For example, a common practice for setting up simple redirects is to use a Source URL of “/donate/” and a Target URL of an external link to a donation platform.
Step 5. Confirm the redirect settings match what you are looking for. If you would like to change the type of redirect, add a title or one of Redirection’s other options, click the settings wheel.
If you plan to share your short URL on Facebook or other third-party sites that might add tracking code to the URL, you should set the Query Parameter to Ignore all parameters.
Types of Redirect
PLEASE NOTE: Redirection will automatically add a redirect as a 301 redirect. This is the most commonly used redirect and is intended to be used for URLs that have permanently changed.
If you expect you’ll need to update or change a redirect record in the future – for example, if you have a specific, time-sensitive event link that you want to redirect to a different landing page until the event is ready to promote or if you have a donation campaign redirect that you expect you’ll want to update with a new Target landing page in the future – you should create this as a 302 redirect, instead.
Read more about types of redirects.
Step 6. When you are finished adding your redirect, click the Add Redirect button to save.
Reviewing Existing 404 Errors and Redirects
Under the Redirection tool, you can also check if you have any existing 404 errors on specific pages by clicking on 404s.
If there are any existing 404 errors, you can then easily add a redirect from this screen by hovering over the 404 URL, and clicking Add Redirect from the options that will appear during hover.
Once you have added redirects to your site, you will find them all under “Redirects.”
Here you can enable, disable, and check redirects.
