A redirect is a small thing to get wrong. The consequences aren’t.
Why URL Redirects Matter
A handful of real, common situations call for redirecting one URL to another:
Similar or misspelled domains. Visitors sometimes type the wrong version of a domain, an extra letter, the wrong TLD. Registering the common misspellings and redirecting them to the correct domain catches that traffic instead of losing it.
Moving to a new domain. A rebrand, a merger, or simply outgrowing the old name all mean the old URLs need somewhere to go.
Shortening long, unmemorable URLs. Nobody types out a five-folder-deep path from memory. A redirect gives people (and marketing materials) something shorter to work with.
Canonicalizing duplicate content. Search engines can treat example.com and www.example.com as two separate sites if they’re not told otherwise. A redirect (paired with a canonical tag) tells them which one is authoritative.
Handling broken URLs gracefully. When someone lands on a dead link, sending them somewhere useful beats showing a blank error page. If those dead links are internal, how to find broken internal links before they pile up is worth doing on a schedule, not just when someone complains.
One thing worth naming honestly: the same technique that redirects a typo to the right domain is also what phishing sites abuse to disguise where a link actually leads. That’s not a reason to avoid redirects, it’s why browsers and security tools flag suspicious redirect chains, and why keeping your own redirects transparent and predictable matters.
301 vs. 302, and Why the Difference Actually Matters
Getting this wrong is the single most common redirect mistake, and it has real SEO consequences.
| Type | What it tells search engines | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| 301 (Permanent) | The content moved for good, treat the new URL as canonical | Domain changes, permalink structure changes, content consolidation |
| 302 (Temporary) | The move isn’t permanent, keep the original URL indexed | A/B tests, maintenance windows, short-term campaigns |
| 307 (Temporary, method-preserving) | Same as 302, but preserves whether the original request was GET or POST | Rare, mostly relevant for form submissions or API-adjacent redirects |
Google has confirmed that 301, 302, and 307 redirects all pass ranking signals, redirects don’t inherently cost you SEO value the way older advice sometimes implied. What actually does cost you: using a 302 for something that’s genuinely permanent (search engines keep treating the old URL as canonical, which defeats the point), and redirect chains, covered below.
The .htaccess Method
For server-level redirects that don’t depend on a plugin being active, .htaccess is still the direct route:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old-domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]
For a custom 404 page instead of the default error page:
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
For a maintenance-mode redirect that lets your own IP through while everyone else sees a holding page (swap in your actual IP address):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.php$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123.123.123.123
RewriteRule $ /maintenance.php [R=302,L]
Note that’s a 302, not a 301, deliberately. The maintenance page isn’t permanent, so search engines shouldn’t treat it as the new canonical destination for your homepage.
The Redirection Plugin (Still the Practical Default)
For anything beyond a handful of one-off redirects, a plugin beats hand-editing .htaccess for one simple reason: logging. The free Redirection plugin tracks 404s as they happen, supports bulk redirect management, and lets you set up conditional rules without touching server config. If you’re already running AIOSEO, its built-in redirect manager covers the same ground without adding a second plugin.
Either way, the practical rule holds regardless of which tool you use: a few hundred redirect rules living in a plugin’s database is fine. The same few hundred rules hand-written into .htaccess get evaluated on every single request to your site, worth consolidating into pattern-based rewrites once the list gets long, rather than left as a growing pile of individual rules.
Redirect Chains, the Silent SEO Tax
A chain is when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Each hop adds latency and dilutes the signal passed to the final destination, even though modern search engines will follow a chain for a few hops before giving up. The practical rule: treat anything past a single hop as a defect worth fixing, not a tolerable inconvenience. Redirect straight to the final destination every time, especially after a migration where old redirects have a way of quietly stacking on top of new ones if nobody audits them.
Questions People Ask About URL Redirection
Should I use a 301 or a 302 redirect?
301 for anything permanent, moving a page for good, changing a domain, consolidating content. 302 only when the original URL is genuinely coming back, maintenance windows, A/B tests, short campaigns. Using 302 for something permanent is the most common mistake, and it keeps search engines from fully crediting the new URL.
Does redirecting a page hurt my SEO rankings?
Not inherently. Google has confirmed that 301, 302, and 307 redirects pass ranking signals rather than losing them. What actually hurts rankings is redirecting to an irrelevant page, leaving long redirect chains in place, or removing a redirect too early before search engines have fully re-indexed the new URL.
What’s a redirect chain and why does it matter?
It’s when one URL redirects to another, which redirects to another, instead of going straight to the final destination. Each hop adds page-load latency and dilutes the ranking signal passed along the chain. Worth fixing any time you find more than one hop.
Should I use a plugin or edit .htaccess directly?
Both work. A plugin like Redirection or AIOSEO is easier to manage and gives you 404 logging, which matters once you’re tracking more than a handful of redirects. Hand-editing .htaccess is fine for structural, site-wide rules, but hundreds of individual rules there get evaluated on every request and are worth consolidating.
Why do I keep getting a “too many redirects” error?
That’s a redirect loop, URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects back to URL A. It’s commonly caused by conflicting rules between a plugin and .htaccess, or by SSL settings in wp-config.php fighting with a forced-HTTPS redirect elsewhere.
Conclusion
Redirects are unglamorous infrastructure work, easy to set up wrong and easy to forget about once they’re in place. Getting the type right (301 for permanent, 302 for genuinely temporary), keeping chains to a single hop, and choosing a method you’ll actually maintain is most of what separates a redirect that quietly protects your rankings from one that quietly costs you traffic for months before anyone notices.
