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Circumstances will often dictate that changes be made to your website, which could mean migrating the entire site or moving a single page to a new URL. Whatever the situation may be, redirects ensure your users are not left confused or even worse, lost. But that’s not the only purpose of redirects. Search engines use them to help in the content indexing process. In this post, we will explain what redirects are, why they are important, when to use them and, how to create simple and PHP redirects.
A redirect is also called a URL redirection or URL forwarding. It is we send a page, form, or a website to a new URL address. To put another way, it’s when we send users and search engines to a URL separate from what they requested.
An example of this would be if you visited Hosting.UK/BlogA, but are sent or redirected Hosting.UK/BlogB.
Redirects are used to accomplish a number of goals, five such examples are:
There are several different types of redirects. These include:
Let’s look at each separately, starting with the Moved Permanently redirect.
This reroutes users to another location and is touted as the best method when implementing redirects on a website.
Unlike its permanent counterpart noted above, this redirect is used to briefly reroute users. A 302 redirect may be used in the case where a page is going through maintenance that would prevent users from accessing that particular information or service.
Instead of leaving users wondering if they entered the wrong information or have them turn to competitors, a Found/Moved Temporarily redirect can prove essential.
If you’ve ever received an “If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here” message while browsing a site, you are familiar with Meta Refresh redirect. They are applied on the page as opposed to on the server and are generally linked to five-second countdowns with the text highlighted above.
Simple Redirect: This allows users to redirect an entire website to another website by preserving the URL path and query string of the old site.
PHP Redirect: A PHP redirect enables users to navigate from one page to another without the need to click any hyperlinks.
There is a myriad of ways to redirect a URL, but for the purpose of this article we’re going to look at a simple redirect and a PHP redirect.
There are a number of straightforward steps involved in creating a simple redirect.
With only few more steps to go you’re almost at the end of the process required to create a redirect.
If you get to the end and your redirects don’t line up with your expectations or achieve the object you set out at the start of the process, you’ll have to delete and recreate them because redirects cannot be edited.
<?php header("Location: http://www.example.com/blog"); ?>
Redirects are useful for several reasons. It’s therefore important that you choose the type of redirect you want based on what you are forwarding. But whether you opt for a simple URL or a PHP redirect, the process remains quick and straightforward. This allows you to cater to your users while carrying out maintenance or doing a complete overhaul of your site or a web page. For more tips visit your trusted website builder or web hosting provider’s knowledge base or blog for tutorials.