Published on

How to Track and Redirect 404 Pages in WordPress

Authors

Sometimes, we might want to change the URL (permalink) of a blog post for various reasons.

In such cases, WordPress does not automatically redirect old blog posts to new URLs. And if someone visits the old URL, they'll land on a "404 Not Found" page which might result in a bad experience for our visitor and potentially impact our SEO.

Thankfully, there is a free WordPress plugin (yeah, No need to pay to access certain features like other plugins) which takes care of both tracking the 404 pages as well as redirecting it to another page.

How to install the plugin?

  1. Login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard (eg: https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/)
  2. Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
  3. Search for "Redirection".
  4. Install and activate the plugin.

After activation, go to Tools > Redirection

For the first time, you'll need to follow their setup wizard (setting up the required database table, configuration, etc) to set it up properly.

Once you're done. You're good to track and redirecting URLs

How to track 404 pages?

After installing the plugin, it'll start 404 errors which you can see in the 404s tab in the "Redirection" plugin

How to redirect 404 pages?

In the 404s tab, you'll see all the pages. If you want to redirect a particular page, then click on the Add Redirect option under the link (when you go over a particular link, it'll show)

Then configure the new URL to which you want to redirect it.

Happy redirecting pages!