Nonprofit WordPress

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A Free Manual for Nonprofits

  • About
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  • WordPress Basics
    • What is WordPress?
    • Creating Content
  • Types of Content
    • Pages
    • Posts
    • Media Items
  • Content Management Basics
    • Write for the Web
    • The Perils of Poor Formatting
    • Help People with Disabilities
    • Linking to External Sites
    • Linking Within Your Site
    • Adding Images
    • Adding Documents
    • Adding Videos
  • Content Management Mastery
    • Editor Tips and Tricks
    • Linking to Email Addresses
    • Linking Within a Page
    • Redirecting Links
  • Administering Your Site
    • The Admin Bar
    • Managing Users
    • Managing Menus
    • Backing Up the Site
    • Updating Your Software

Redirecting Links

Overview

Sometimes it’s convenient to have a link on your site that redirects elsewhere.

(These are often referred to as “301 redirects”, but it’s fine to say just plain “redirects” too.)

Example: Change of Address

Imagine that your About and Contact pages are separate:

  • https://ghi.wisc.edu/about
  • https://ghi.wisc.edu/contact

Later you decide to combine both pages into a single page:

  • https://ghi.wisc.edu/about-contact

If a site or search engine has linked to the old page addresses, anyone following those links will get a Page Not Found error.

It would be great if we could have the old page addresses automatically redirect people to the new address.

Example: External Fundraising Site

Imagine that your organization is hosting a fundraiser called “Together Now”. The page for the fundraiser is on a separate, partner website that handles your donations.

  • https://together-now.donationvendor.com

Unfortunately, sharing that address in print and email shines a light on Donation Vendor’s site rather than yours.

It would be great if we could use an address on our site:

  • https://ghi.wisc.edu/together-now

…and have that address automatically redirect people to the donation vendor’s site.

Note: once the visitor clicks that link, the donation vendor’s site address will appear in the browser’s address bar. Even so, we’ve used our site name to promote the event.

Solution

WordPress doesn’t directly provide this kind of redirection, but there are two ways to do it.

With supreme geekery

It’s possible to do this behind the scenes by editing web server configuration files. But this requires some technical chops, and even once it’s set up you’ll find it no simpler to add/edit/delete redirection rules.

With a plugin

A plugin has the benefit of letting any website administrator edit your redirection rules—no supreme geekery required.

Many plugins let you manage link redirection from within WordPress. Two examples:

  • Safe Redirect Manager
  • Yoast SEO Premium

Elegant Themes published an article discussing several plugins:

Turn Around: The 7 Best Redirect Plugins for WordPress

Elegant Themes (2015)

Creative Commons License
Nonprofit WordPress by Andrew Giesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://nonprofitwordpress.info.