No Sleight of Hand Just Some Redirection

Posted on by Alan Levine

The Trick, Said Quick

Manage moved links or create custom short links to external sites by setting up a redirect inside your WordPress site.

The Trick, In Intricate

If you are a little like me, you loathe broken links for finding that the link you clicked results in a 404 error.

On your own WordPress site, you can keep the web from being a bigger miss of broken links if you have moved a post or page elsewhere (even to another site) by using a plugin that manages web redirection. This is done in a way where a click from, say https://cogdogblog.com/you-broke-the-web/ can be automatically sent to maybe a new URL in the same site. Or one like https://cogdogblog.com/you-killed-the-web/ can go somewhere outside.

These examples are done with the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin. This adds a post meta box to a post/page editor that enables you to turn that WordPress page/post into a redirect.

First check the box to turn this from WordPress content into a redirect. You will still want to create a title for it, mainly to generate it’s permalin editor, but it’s also good to you can tell in the listing of posts and pages.

Then enter the URl where you want to send users you come to this link, say https://2019.pressedconf.org/.

Finally, set up the permalink to have the URL you want to act like a redirect on your own site (Pages work best in general so you don’t get the permalink extras for blog posts. So in this example, some site with a page whose address is /best-conference-ever will redirect visitors to the desired destination. Try it! https://cogdogblog.com/2019/04/best-conference-ever/.

It also shows up clearly in your dashboard as a redirect:

I’ve found some special cases where redirection is useful to get around theme limitations. For the Cover theme I use in my own blog and also on Networked Narratives, the top slider displays posts tagged with a special owner defined tag.

For NetNarr, I wanted to have the event pages for our studio visits show up there, but they are WordPress Pages. But I used this plugin to create a new post, add the redirect to the studio page, and include the special tag to put in the slider.

For example, this event page is a standard WordPress page http://netnarr.arganee.world/studio-visits/alex-saum/. To create something to have it appear in the web site slider at the top, I made a new blog post, set up the re-direct as show above, and set the featured image for the redirect post to use the same one as the page. So see how this URL (a post) redirects to the page I want.

The nice thing about this plugin is, in addition to the featured image, I can also write the excerpt I want it to use to make it appear on the front of my site, and set categories and tags so it shows up among other content.

I have also used the Redirection plugin on sites where I need only to forward visitors elsewhere (the feature image, et al not needed). I have a few sites where I want to do more or less what short URLs do to create a more readable URL to say a Google Doc URL or some other one that is long and convoluted.

The Trick, Done Slick

The Trick, Give it a Kick

Tweet back a reply with an example you tried and/or how might you use this?

Featured Image by Katrin B. from Pixabay