Hi
I want to redirect traffic to my website home page instead of the 404 error page and wondered how I would go about this? I have been able to make a custom 404 page but I want to remove it completely and send visitors straight to the site’s front page.
Many thanks
Hi Iain
This plugin might do the trick :)
https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-404-redirect-to-homepage/
This plugin was quick and easy to use plus I found you can put whatever url in there to redirect it to a custom page of your choice. I replace my old site with wordpress but google was still showing all the old urls in the search so what I wondering is how long will my old urls flush out of the google search engine and be replaced with the new ones at this time it’s okay I’ll still get the traffic been working on the new one for a week and half.
plugin worked like a charm thanks
http://vintagetoyadvertisements.com/
A matter of fact I’m going to make the custom page telling the visitor you been redirected to this page cause we our switching our site over to a new platform, if you couldn’t find the toy ad you were looking for feel free to contact us and we will put the ad up for you. Thanks for stopping by.
You know people scratch their heads how did i get here and move on never to come back again.
I created my redirection page like stated above and it’s working just fine but what I notice was on some of my thumbnails I used the shortlink (I’m glad it was only a few) and when I clicked the thumbnail it took me to the redirection page so now I’m wondering if it’s going to do that on every shortlink will it do the same thing(so far my answer is yes).
I have to make a few more test to see if it does it when I have the redirection pointing to the home page. I’ll kept you posted of my results.
When I placed it with the home page url it did the same thing with the shortlink so if you use a lot of shortlinks or if you send somebody the shortlink it’s going to whatever link you put in all 404 redirect to home page. For now I won’t be using shortlinks. If I see any other issues i’ll keep you posted
Hi Greg
Thanks, I’ll try that plugin. However, I was wondering if it was possible to edit the 404.php file to redirect it straight to the homepage?
Thanks
Hi Iain
Another favourite is:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Plugins like the above will edit your installations .htaccess file and add a 301 redirect. That’s the SEO correct way of handling the redirection. I think if we edit your 404 file we’ll be getting into other forms of redirection that aren’t so ideal.
If you want to forgo a plugin you can edit your .htaccess file directly and add the 301 there.
Ref: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/404-error-need-301-redirect-in-htaccess
If the above thread isn’t useful, try a quick search on the topic. There is a lot of info out there on managing .htaccess and 301 redirects. (I’d go with a plugin though).