Skip to main content

Redirects

Sending an old page address to a new one, so links you have already shared keep working.

A redirect forwards one address on your website to another. When you rebuild a site, rename a page, or fold two pages into one, the old address stops existing — and every link to it, in an email, on a business card, in someone else's blog post, lands on nothing. A redirect fixes that in one line.

Redirects live on your website's Plugins page, beside the cookie banner and the analytics plugins.

Adding one

Each redirect has two halves.

  • The old address — a path on your website, shown with your domain as a fixed prefix so the field reads as "your domain, then a path": /old-menu, /services/plumbing.
  • The new address — either another page of your website, picked from a list of the pages you actually have, or a full https:// address somewhere else entirely.

Redirects are permanent (301), which is what tells search engines to carry the old page's standing over to the new one rather than treat it as a fresh page.

The rules

A few things are refused, and it is worth knowing why:

  • Your homepage, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt cannot be redirected. These have to keep serving your website itself.
  • No two redirects can share the same old address. There would be no way to say which one wins.
  • A redirect cannot point at itself, directly or as an obvious loop.
  • Destinations must be a page on your site or an http/https address. Nothing else.
  • A website may hold up to 100 redirects. Beyond that you are doing a migration, not adjusting a setting — ask the assistant to restructure the site instead.

Trailing slashes are forgiven in both directions: a visitor arriving at /old-page/ follows a redirect you stored as /old-page.

When they take effect

Immediately, on your dev site and your live site. Redirects are applied as a request comes in, so there is nothing to republish.

Next