One of my favorite WordPress Plug-ins of all time is Redirection. I've used it for years. It has a very very simple purpose but you can use it for many many things.

The Redirection WordPress Plug-in's main purpose is to make sure that when you take a link from an old website and you might redesign your website or you might just redesign the page and want to name it something different; so that it doesn't break the url.

You essentially take the old url name and then you tell your server where to redirect the old url name to in terms of a new url. These are called 301 redirects.

This is important because if you have broken links it's going to kill your SEO and Google is going to hate you.

So let me show you how redirection works in its basic form.

First what you're going to do is install it and you install it by going to plugins; and you can either go to the wordpress.org plugin directory and download it and then upload it by clicking "add new" and then "upload plugin," or what most people do is they just go to plugins and then search for it right in the backend of their WordPress website.

Redirection has a weird little flower icon but uh John Godley built it several several years ago; it has more than one million active installations and it was updated four months ago, so John and his team do a great job of keeping it updated.

You would just click "Install" now and then "Activate" and then basically it shows up under your tools on the sidebar panel "Tools" and then "Redirection."

So that there are no broken links on your website, what you would do is you would put old url in Source, and new url in Target. And then click "add redirect" and all of a sudden you have an old page that links to a new page.

If you do change what's called the permalink structure on your website, you would go to "Settings" and then "Permalinks."

I recommend most websites set up their permalinks with the "post name" option. This takes some of the crap out of your url it makes it shorter and much easier for Google to index your pages read your pages and rank you higher for specific keywords.

If you have a website that's not using the "post name" permalink url structure, and you want to change to the post name url structure the most updated version of the Redirection plug-in now allows you to update your permalink structure without having to perform all of your own individual redirects.

Now when you set up redirection, check this option that says "monitor permalink changes in WordPress posts and pages."

So whether you're redesigning a website, and you're changing your url naming, whether you're changing your url naming for promotional purposes from a vanity url or just for better SEO,  you definitely want to make sure that you're using the redirection plugin.

Thanks for reading, watching and listening, and have a great day!

KEEP MARKETING!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC and founder of The Voice Event, and The Voice Designer, has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 15 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing, Email Marketing and most recently, Voice App Design and Development - Alexa Skills and Google Actions. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.