Joomla 3.x. Using the Redirect Manager

In this tutorial you will learn how to use a Redirect Manager in Joomla 3.x.

Joomla 3.x. Using the Redirect Manager

Joomla 3.x includes a component named Redirect Manager. The Redirect Manager helps you to identify URLs that your visitors are accessing but they don’t actually exist, pages that return a 404 not found status.

It is important to eliminate 404 pages for several reasons, two of them are the following:

1. Usability – You may have visitors trying to reach a popular page of yours that either has been deleted or moved, and you have the potential to lose readers if they can’t find what they’re looking for.

2. Search Engine Optimization – Search engines expect for websites to move pages around or delete them. Having an excessive number of these types of pages however may cause some search engines to penalize your site.

The Redirect manager in Joomla 3.x allows you to see what URLs users are accessing on your site but they don’t exist. For example, on our Joomla 3.x website, the following URL does not exist: http://domain.com/this-page/does-not/exist

When we access that page, the Redirect Manager will log the fact that someone visited that URL and got a 404 page. It will also give us the ability to automatically redirect users that visit that URL to another page, such as /index.php/xx-my-blog-post. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to do that.

1. Let’s learn how to redirect a page with the Joomla 3.x Redirect Manager:

   1. Log into your Joomla Admin Dashboard.

   2. In the top menu, click Components and then click Redirect:

      

   3. On this page you will see a list of bad URLs that Joomla has logged for you. Click the URL that you would like to set up a redirect for:

      

2. There are a few things you can input for this redirect, but we will enter only the essentials, the Destination URL and Status.

   1. Destination URL – Enter here the URL to be redirected to.

   2. In our testing, we entered http://domain.com/index.php/xx-my-blog-post as the destination URL.

   3. Status – Set publication status.

   4. Change status from Disabled to Enabled:

      

3. After entering the full URL to redirect to and updating the status, click Save in the top left of the page.

4. Now you can test your new redirect.

Thank you for reading this tutorial. Now you know how to use the Redirect Manager in Joomla 3.x.

Feel free to check the detailed video tutorial below:

Joomla 3.x. Using the Redirect Manager