Redirect Manager

Redirects are how a site changes shape without losing the people and the rankings attached to its old addresses. Every URL you retire, every slug you rewrite, every move to a new domain leaves links pointing at something that no longer exists, and a redirect is what catches them.

These guides cover setting them up correctly, which mostly means choosing the right status code. A permanent move and a temporary one are different instructions to a browser and to a search engine, and using the wrong one either loses the ranking you were protecting or caches a change you meant to reverse.

Beyond single URLs: moving a whole domain, redirecting categories and tags, handling query parameters, normalising uppercase and trailing slashes, and doing it in bulk when a restructure produces hundreds at once. There is also the question of what a deleted page should return, which is not always a redirect.

The diagnostic articles deal with the ways redirects go wrong. Chains, where a URL passes through several hops before arriving and loses a little at each one. And loops, where two rules point at each other and nothing loads at all.

Both are invisible from a browser, which shows you the destination and nothing about the route. The diagnostic articles here show how to see the whole path.