If you’re a keen webmaster and find yourself constantly adding content to your WordPress website, installing plugins, and trying to stay ahead on SEO, you might find Simple 301 Redirects a handy plugin to install.

How’s it Work?

Say, for example, you’ve had a tech blog online for a year or two and the URL for that is http://mywebsite.com/blog/. If you’ve received traffic or links to a blog post then it’s reasonable to assume that Google has indexed the URL and someone may have bookmarked it or saved it to Read Later. But say then, you notice that it’s more like a news page and you’d like to change the URL to http://mywebsite.com/news/ or maybe even something a little more SEO-friendly, like http://mywebsite.com/tech-news/ – with Simple 301 Redirects, redirecting old URLs to new URLs is easy and allows you to keep all of your old links working, whilst using your new URL structure.

What’s it Do?

Simple 301 Redirects adds a new menu item below Settings in the WordPress admin. From here, you can add the requested URL and the destination you’d like to redirect it to. For example, you may want to redirect /about-us/ to /about/ – with Simple 301 Redirects, this is easy and means no more going to your host’s control panel and adding them using a clunky interface.

Requests on the left, new destinations on the right

Behind the scenes, Simple 301 Redirects takes the original request and changes the page header to contain ‘HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’ then the location of the new destination. The browser then redirects to the pages new location.

Costs, Caveats, Etc.

I’ve been using this plugin for several years now and I’ve always found it reliable. It’s very simple (the clue is in the name) and only deals with managing 301 redirect links (permanently moved) and not 302 links (temporarily moved). In addition to this, it’s only good for managing small numbers of redirects so if you’re looking for something to bulk upload a CSV of hundreds of links, this plugin won’t be ideal.