When your website undergoes a redesign or you change theWordPress permalinkstructure, the biggest concern is that the old URLs for some articles or pages are not updated to the new ones, causing broken links and resulting in dead links.
A couple of days ago, after changing the permalinks for Naibabiji's notes, there was a need to record the website's 404 pages, so I found this plugin named 404 Solution in the WordPress plugin repository, which can effectively serve as a 404 solution.
Plugin Introduction
404 Solution redirects Page Not Found errors (404 errors) to existing pages and logs the errors. It can also automatically create redirects based on the best match of the URL the visitor is most likely trying to access.
Features:
- Highly configurable – redirect specific 404 URLs to any existing page.
- Automatically create redirects based on the URL the visitor is most likely trying to access.
- Get a list of 404s that have occurred.
- View logs of 404 pages and perform redirects, including referrer data.
- Compatible with WooCommerce – supports pages, posts, products, and custom post types.
- Display a list of page suggestions on a custom 404 page with shortcodes (any page can be a custom 404 page).
- Basic plugin usage statistics.
- Automatically delete redirects when a URL matches a new page or new post.
- Manual and automatic redirects will be automatically deleted when they are no longer in use.
- Redirect based on regular expressions, including query data.
- Convert 404 traffic by providing visitors with a better browsing experience and eliminate 404 errors on your website.
Feature Demo
Looking at the feature introduction of 404 Solution, doesn't it seem very powerful? Below are actual screenshots of the functionality after Naibabiji installed it.
After installing the plugin, it automatically records the 404 page links visited on your website every day. You can click edit on the link, then add a 301 redirect rule. The rules support regular expressions for batch URL redirects, and you can also view the log records of visits to this 404 page.
When you create a 404 page 301 redirect rule, you can also see the daily redirect access records.
In the settings, you can enable IP address logging to see which IP accessed which 404 pages. This can help identify malicious scanning crawlers, which can then be blocked via firewall software, indirectly enhancingWordPress security。
The settings interface has an option to automatically create 301 rules. When the plugin detects a link that has a highly matching link on the site, it will automatically create a redirect rule without manual intervention.
At the same time, the plugin supports regularly and automatically cleaning up unused 404 redirect records, so you don't have to worry about too many records taking up server resources.
Plugin Download
WordPress websites abroad can directly search for and install 404 Solution from the backend. For servers in China, you can find a way to download the plugin zip file from the URL below and upload it for installation.