Maintenance Redirect vs Redirection

This plugin is intended primarily for designers / developers that need to allow clients to preview sites before being available to the general public or to temporarily hide your WordPress site while undergoing major updates. Any logged in user with WordPress administrator privileges will be allowed to view the site regardless of the settings in the plugin. The exact privilege can be set using a filter hook – see FAQs. The behaviour of this plugin can be enabled or disabled at any time without losing any of the settings configured in its settings pane. However, deactivating the plugin is recommended versus having it activated while disabled. When redirect is enabled it can send 2 different header types. “200 OK” is best used for when the site is under development and “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” is best for when the site is temporarily taken offline for small amendments. If used for a long period of time, 503 can damage your Google ranking. A list of IP addresses can be set up to completely bypass maintenance mode. This option is useful when needing to allow a client’s entire office to access the site while in maintenance mode without needing to maintain individual access keys. See FAQ below about working through a proxy. Access keys work by creating a cookie on the user’s computer that will be checked for when maintenance mode is active. When a new key is created, a link to create the access key cookie will be emailed to the email address provided. Access can then be revoked either by disabling or deleting the key. This plugin allows three methods of notifying users that a site is undergoing maintenance: They can be presented with a simple message. They can be presented with a custom HMTL page. They can be redirected to a static HTML page. This static page will need to be uploaded to the server via FTP or some other method. This plugin DOES NOT include any way to upload the static page file. Any URL can be used here, and it doesn’t need to be on the same server (so you could redirect back to the client’s current site if you’re working on a dev site, for example). However, it should NOT be the URL of a WordPress page or post on the same site as this will result in an infinite redirect loop.

Redirection is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress. With it you can easily manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This can help reduce errors and improve your site ranking. Redirection is designed to be used on sites with a few redirects to sites with thousands of redirects. It has been a WordPress plugin for over 10 years and has been recommended countless times. And it’s free! Full documentation can be found at https://redirection.me Redirection is compatible with PHP from 7.4 to 8.5. Redirect manager Create and manage redirects quickly and easily without needing Apache or Nginx knowledge. If your WordPress supports permalinks then you can use Redirection to redirect any URL. There is full support for regular expressions so you can create redirect patterns to match any number of URLs. You can match query parameters and even pass them through to the target URL. The plugin can also be configured to monitor when post or page permalinks are changed and automatically create a redirect to the new URL. Conditional redirects In addition to straightforward URL matching you can redirect based on other conditions: Login status – redirect only if the user is logged in or logged out WordPress capability – redirect if the user is able to perform a certain capability Browser – redirect if the user is using a certain browser Referrer – redirect if the user visited the link from another page Cookies – redirect if a particular cookie is set HTTP headers – redirect based on a HTTP header Custom filter – redirect based on your own WordPress filter IP address – redirect if the client IP address matches Server – redirect another domain if also hosted on this server Page type – redirect if the current page is a 404 Full logging A configurable logging option allows to view all redirects occurring on your site, including information about the visitor, the browser used, and the referrer. A ‘hit’ count is maintained for each redirect so you can see if a URL is being used. Logs can be exported for external viewing, and can be searched and filtered for more detailed investigation. Display geographic information about an IP address, as well as a full user agent information, to try and understand who the visitor is. You are able to disable or reduce IP collection to meet the legal requirements of your geographic region, and can change the amount of information captured from the bare minimum to HTTP headers. You can also log any redirect happening on your site, including those performed outside of Redirection. Add HTTP headers HTTP headers can be added to redirects or your entire site that help reduce the impact of redirects or help increase security. You can also add your own custom headers. Track 404 errors Redirection will keep track of all 404 errors that occur on your site, allowing you to track down and fix problems. Errors can be grouped to show where you should focus your attention, and can be redirected in bulk. Query parameter handling You can match query parameters exactly, ignore them, and even pass them through to your target. Migrate Permalinks Changed your permalink structure? You can migrate old permalinks simply by entering the old permalink structure. Multiple migrations are supported. Apache & Nginx support By default Redirection will manage all redirects using WordPress. However you can configure it so redirects are automatically saved to a .htaccess file and handled by Apache itself. If you use Nginx then you can export redirects to an Nginx rewrite rules file. Fine-grained permissions Fine-grained permissions are available so you can customise the plugin for different users. This makes it particularly suitable for client sites where you may want to prevent certain actions, and remove functionality. Import & Export The plugin has a fully-featured import and export system and you can: Import and export to Apache .htaccess Export to Nginx rewrite rules Copy redirects between sites using JSON Import and export to CSV for viewing in a spreadsheet Use WP CLI to automate import and export You can also import from the following plugins: Simple 301 Redirects SEO Redirection Safe Redirect Manager Rank Math WordPress old slug redirects Quick Post/Pages redirects Search Regex compatible Redirection is compatible with Search Regex, allowing you to bulk update your redirects. Wait, it’s free? Yes, it’s really free. There’s no premium version and no need to pay money to get access to features. This is a dedicated redirect management plugin. Support Please submit bugs, patches, and feature requests to: https://github.com/johngodley/redirection Please submit translations to: https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/redirection