301 Redirects
Hey WDS in today’s video we are going to talk about 301 redirects. We will cover why they are important and how they are set up on WDS builds.
The Video
The Why
So, what are 301 redirects? In the world of the internet, a 301 redirect is a way to permanently redirect one URL to another. It’s a way to tell search engines and users that the old URL has been moved to a new location permanently, and that they should update their bookmarks and links to the new URL.
You might be wondering why 301 redirects matter at all. There are several reasons actually and they all have to do with SEO.
Looking at SEO from a very high level view, Google will use the URLs of the site to generate where a site ranks in a search. Because of this, 301 redirects are incredibly important for SEO when rebuilding an existing site as they prevent loss of traffic and Google search engine rankings already established. These should be done on EVERY new build that is coming from an existing site. Here are a couple examples.
Updating Permalinks or URL structures
If the website permalink, or URL structure, has been adjusted 301 redirects will direct any old URLs to the new structured URLs.
For example:
If the original product URLs looks like this: mycooldomain.com/product/awesome-t-shirt
And the new product URLS look like this: mycooldomain.com/product/really-cool-t-shirt
The redirect would force any traffic going to mycooldomain.com/product/awesome-t-shirt to go to the new URL mycooldomain.com/product/really-cool-t-shirt
Merging content
When pages are combined to reduce site clutter, a 301 redirect will redirect the URLs from one page to the corresponding URLs on the other page.
For Example:
The About page and Who We Are page have been combined to a Learn About Us page.
Two redirects would be set to ensure traffic from the original pages flows to the new page.
-
- From mycooldomain.com/about > To mycooldomain.com/learn-about-us
- From mycooldomain.com/who-we-are > To mycooldomain.com/learn-about-us
The How
Now, let’s talk about how you can help with gathering information for redirects and what it looks like on the WDS site.
The best thing you can do to help with redirects is to recognize when a redirect is needed. A good rule to follow is that if a URL for a page name changes it should have a redirect.
When referring to New Builds, the easiest way to spot this is if we are rebuilding a customer’s site. Rebuilds often mean either the page names are being changed, or we are reducing the page count. If you see any of this it is best to document the old URLs. When submitting your new build request, you can simply add in a note about needing redirects set up and provide from and to URLS.
For Example:
The customer is rebuilding their site and they need to combine a few pages and are going to remove a few as well. Your request might look something like this:
Set up the following 301 redirects:
From: mycooldomain.com/home.html > To: mycooldomain.com
From: mycooldomain.com/about-us.html > To: mycooldomain.com/about
From: mycooldomain.com/services.html > To: mycooldomain.com/about
From: mycooldomain.com/contact-me > To: mycooldomain.com/contact
When looking at updates, you might notice that the customer is combining or renaming pages.
For Example:
The customer really doesnt like the name of their About page and wants it more personalized, so they ask to rename it to Jack’s Life Story. Your request might include something like this:
From: mycooldomain.com/about > To: mycooldomain.com/jacks-life-story
It is important to note that redirects can be set up when a site is still on a temp domain but will only become active once the site gets published to the live domain.
The Redirection Plugin
Note: The WS Teams will not be expected to know the plugin details. The following information is just here to show you what the plugin looks like.
In the WordPress dashboard after the plugin is installed and activated, there will be a new menu item in the sidebar under Tools called Redirection.
Redirects can be added by entering the source URL (the old URL) and the target URL (the new URL) in the appropriate fields. There are other fields present, but these are the important ones to note.
That’s it for this video on 301 redirects. Thank you for watching and tune in for the next Designer’s Desk video!