Fix the Dead Ends: Mastering 404 Redirects in WordPress
By simply adding a file called 404.php into your WordPress theme directly, you can quite easily create and customize the page shown when a visitor tries to access something that isn’t there. But what if you wanted to automatically redirect this user to your front page (or some other page on your site) instead of showing them a 404 error page? Well, the solution is quite simple.
header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”); header(“Location: ” . get_bloginfo(‘url’));
From Lost to Found: Redirecting 404 Errors the Smart Way
If you place the above code snippet and nothing else into a file called 404.php within the root of your WordPress theme directory, then whenever someone tries to view a page that doesn’t exist, they will be automatically and instantly redirected to your site’s homepage.
Keeping Visitors on Track: Handling 404s in WordPress
Be careful, though, you need to make sure that there are no spaces, empty lines, or any other type of output (including HTML) above those two lines of code. If there are, then you’ll most likely get a PHP error complaining that the headers cannot be set as there has already been some output.
Don’t Let Errors Kill Your SEO: WordPress Redirect Essentials
Of course yo u don’t necessarily have to redirect them to your front page. You could change it to redirect all 404 page-not-found requests to some other page on your site. For example, the following code snippet would redirect the visitor to your /about/ page.
header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”); header(“Location: ” . get_bloginfo(‘url’) . “/about/”);
Guide the Lost: Repairing 404 Pages with WordPress Redirects
It’s as simple as that. You’ve now redirected all 404 page not found requests to some other page on your site. Simple!
