Best for: Any store that renames products or categories and wants 301 redirects and 404 logs without paying for an SEO Premium tier.
This WordPress redirect plugin by author John Godley is the first one that comes up when you search for redirection in the WordPress plugin library. This one happens to be my favorite one for a long time and there are good reasons for that
Pros
- Free, 2 million+ installs, maintained since 2008
- Logs 404s so you can redirect retired products before they lose rank
- Regex, conditional and group redirects, import and export
Cons
- No schema or on-page features; it does one job
- Logs can grow large on busy stores unless you cap them
- 4.4-star rating with some complaints about the setup wizard
Key features (11)
- It can monitor the 404s. Keeps a log of all 404s that you can map to 301 redirects.
- The pass-through feature allows you to pass a URL to another page or a website.
- Keep a log of all redirects. Very useful in cases where you want to see which redirected pages are getting the most hits.
- The plugin seems to work for all the URLs to be redirected and it just does not only work for the URLs that do not exist.
- The useful WP CLI feature support is the Unique Selling Point of this plugin.
- This is not at all dependent on the Apache.htaccess as it is capable of working stand alone within the WordPress framework.
- Automatic inclusion of the 301 redirections is possible just as when the URL of the post changes.
- There is support for the export/ import to the CSV, JSON, Nginx, and the.htaccess type of the rewrite rules.
- There is also a possibility for making a manual inclusion of the 301, 302, and 307 redirects for any file, including the WordPress post.
- Full support provided for the Nginx and Apache.
- The plugin is also flexible and that could be seen with its complete localized support and availability in a variety of languages.
