Do you need a create a redirect in your WordPress website? Well keep watching, in
this video I'll show you three methods you can use to create a redirect for
your WordPress website. First what is a redirect? A lot of people get really
confused about that. Well think about it like going to your favorite restaurant,
you've been going there for years so you get in your car you drive to the
restaurant, when you go to the building you see a note on the door telling you
the new location that they've moved to and they give you the directions on how
to get there so then you get back in your car you head over to the new
location so that you can eat at your favorite restaurant which has moved. Same
thing happens on the web. Many articles, many website pages get updated and when
they get updated they need to let people know where they've gone. So that's what a
redirect is. There are several different kinds of redirects for the technical
side of it but for the purpose of this video we'll just concentrate on the 301
redirect. That means it's a permanent redirection of a web address from an old
web address location to a new web address location and it's very simple to
do in WordPress so let's cover the three methods that we can use in most of
these methods we'll be using a plugin and then at the end I'll show you how
you can do it on your server side instead. So the first method we'll be
using a plugin called redirection so let's head over to our WordPress
dashboard, we're going to our plugins area, click add new, and in the search box
we're looking for redirection. A very simple plugin that we want to install
this is the one we're looking for so let's go ahead and click install now and
with all plugins once you install it we need to go ahead and activate it as well.
Once it's activated you'll see an area here where we can click on settings
right here, you can also find the redirection under your tools, click
Redirection. So now we have a really easy setup. The source URL you want to type in
what the old address is and then the target URL you want to put in what the
new address is and then when you're done just click add redirect. So anybody who
tries to go to the old post will now be redirected to the new post.
The next plugin we're looking for is page links too because sometimes you
want to keep the post or page but then direct it to another poster page so to
do that let's go back over to plugins, we want to add new again, and we're looking
for Page Links To. Scrolling down this is the one we're looking for so let's click
install now and you'll also want to activate it as well you see it's
activated here. Now you can go into a post, we'll go into hello world
and scrolling down you see that it says page links to and you want to give it the
custom URL of where you want this page to go. So I'll just type in one of my
other posts and I'll paste that there and you can decide if you want it to
open in a new tab or not. I'm gonna keep it like that and now we can update that.
Once you update that you'll get a note up here stating that the content is
pointing to a custom URL and you're good to go. Now the final plugin that you can
use is called the simple 301 redirects and it doesn't get any simpler than that
you simply put in the old one, put in the new one and it'll redirect that page.
So again let's head back over to our WordPress dashboard, our plugins area,
we'll click add new and we're looking for simple 301 redirects. Once we type
that in we see this is the one we want so again let's install now and then
we'll also have to activate it. Now, you'll want to pick the one that works
best for you, you don't want to use all of these in conjunction with each other
just pick the one that you like best that you feel most comfortable with and
use only that one. So we have the simple 301 redirects here and then under
Settings, 301 redirects is where we can go to make the changes and this is very
similar to the redirection plugin. Here you want to just put in your old page
like this and then go ahead and put in the full URL address of the page that
you want to go to like this and we'll save changes like that. You can also set
up 301 redirects on your htaccess file. It's a
bit more advanced and you'll need to have an FTP client to connect to your
website from your hosting account and you'll need to update your htaccess
file. I'll show you what you can add for that. Once you've connected to your
website through your FTP client you want to head over to the folder that has the
htaccess so we'll go to public HTML and then we're looking for htaccess. You
want to download that we're also going to rename this to old in case something
happens then we'll go back to it. It's like making a backup of it.
So we renamed it old, we've downloaded it, and now we can open it up in a text
editor to make the changes. You can use any text editor you want, I'll edit with
my notepad++ because I have that on my computer. Now when you have it open
you'll simply want to go to the bottom of the file, start a new line, and you can
add something like this to it. This is the old post and you want to redirect it
to your new post. So any time that you would have a new redirect that you need
to do you'd have to go into your htaccess and add that here then you simply
save it, go up and save, minimize that, we'll go over to our FTP client,
and we'll upload the newly created htaccess file. So that's how you could do it on
this server. So there are four methods that you can use to create 301 redirects
for your WordPress website. Did you learn something from today's video? If so
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