How to Add 301 Redirect in Joomla
Need to change your page URL, but worried about how you would redirect users to the new one? Don’t worry, Joomla already has the answer to your problem with the URL Redirect Manager plugin.
If you have recently changed any of your site page URL then your frequent visitors might find it difficult to get to the new link as the old URL will be giving them 404 errors. So to avoid such embarrassing situations you can use Joomla’s in-built feature called the URL Redirect to redirect your users to a new link when they land on the old URL.
Using the 301 Redirect, it will help your users go to the new URL as soon as they visit the deprecated one. So through this article, I will walk you through how you can set up the 301 Redirect to your Joomla website with just a few easy steps.
How is the 301 Redirect helpful?
Let’s say you had this www.YOURDOMAIN.com/example link, but now you plan to change the site link structure and update certain things because of which the permalink has also been updated. So now your site link changes to www.YOURDOMAIN.com/new-example. So when your old users visit the former link they will encounter a 404 error or Page Not Found because the URL has been changed now.
Therefore in order to avoid such situations and lose your audience, it's better to add the 301 Redirect. Joomla has an in-built feature of URL redirection which in simple terms means that it will redirect users from the expired link to the new one without much effort. This is also helpful in maintaining your SEO weight from the old link to the new one if you observe the best practices.
How to set up 301 Redirect?
Now the main question is how would you set up such redirects for your Joomla website. The answer is simple, Joomla comes with a pre-installed feature that is the Redirect plugin. With its help, you can correct the older links or redirect from old to new links.
Before you start to redirect the links, make sure you have the System-Redirect plugin enabled in your Joomla backend.
Creating the New Redirect
To create a new link redirect, navigate to Components > Redirects. As soon as you click on Redirects, you will be in the Redirect dashboard where you can see the list of all the redirect links. You can manage your redirects from there.
Now, click on the New button to create a new Redirection link. Here you have to add your expired and new links in order to create the redirect.
- Expired URL - In this field, insert either the path or URL or the old page from which you want to redirect the users.
- New URL - This is the new page on which you want to land the users.
Make sure the status is Enabled otherwise it will not work. You can add an optional Comment related to the redirection for your future reference. At last, simply Save the changes.
After saving, test the change by opening the expired URL and it will now redirect to the new URL, and you are done!
Note: Make sure the Expired link you add should show a 404 page and that it should not be a working page anymore.
Thus with these simple steps, you can now save yourself from embarrassment before your customers by redirecting them to the new page link instead of an error page. With its help, the SEO of the site will not be hampered much and you can continue to keep the site engagement intact. Do check out this amazing Joomla feature and let me know in the comments if this was helpful.
