Frustrating Links – How to Use Redirect Plugins

There isn’t really any reason for me to go around the frustrating ordeal honestly, so let’s dig right into the thick of things!

The Problem

For some very odd reason my website has switched up the way permalinks are written and by doing so has changed so many old ones that have caused many broken links. Sites who have previous linked to me- are now getting ” Page Not Found”. Even my old pins are now broken. The featured recipes at the top of this website? Up until this morning were broken- the confusing part is I fixed them a couple months ago. So what’s going on? Why all of a sudden are broken links showing up?  This has been beyond frustrating to me, it’s been over a couple years since it started and yet for some reason thing week checking through my google analytics showed me a spread sheet of broken links. 

Confused Beyond Confused 

For the life of me I cannot change the URL’s from using “-”  to use ” /” in which would make some of the links correct. The second issue is the main way the permalinks have been saved. Older links were saved by dates first then the post title. Somewhere along the line I had changed it to say the post title , not the date at all. This was not supposed to change blog posts already posted. Yet , here and there – they were changed without my knowledge. It’s messed a ton of things up. Regular maintenance is done on my site by myself, yet out of the blue links just change? No major changes have been made to the site, only a few new plugins , no settings have been changed . ARG! 

Take a Breather 

While I do not know why or honestly how , I have for the moment downloaded a redirect plugin. It’s called Redirection ( for wordpress) A very straight forward plugin, you take you’re missing or broken link , plug it into Source URL line, then you take the link you want/need traffic going too into the target URL line. The Query Parameters, I had to change to ” Ignore all Parameters” Because my bad links are with a / and the good links are using a – ( I still can’t change this! When I go to change permalink in the post itself, no matter if I put //, it changes to – when saved, Help me out here!) For some reason when it was on match, the redirect didn’t work, so ignoring the slight difference in the /- part it worked. 

 It works immediately, and you can add as many redirects as needed. There’s no bad part here other then still not understanding what is going on with my site. There’s more to this plugin but I’m using it for simple redirects. The feature 404 is GREAT because this is a log of all the 404 pulled on your site, the broken link is listed. I click on it, search my own site for the post and then redirect.  I had 99 broken links to fix and instead of finding them once every few weeks or months I had it all listed before me. While seeing so many broken links is not cool, it’s great to see the list downsize as it’s fixed. I will for now on check this list and fix it as quick as possible. 

The log keeps , well a log of all your redirects, when used and by whom ( browsers used, and website it came from) This way you can easily contact the site if they have the wrong link , and you can fix it directly from that source. Most of mine were from Pinterest but not my pin, so sadly I cannot easily contact the source. My pins on the other hand I can fix. 

Surprise Surprise 

As soon as I finished the redirects, I got an update from the plugin on how many ” hits” ( views) it’s gotten, my most popular recipe ever ( White Bean Soup) Had over 30 hits within the hour. -_-  It kinda made me walk away from my computer a bit, this tells me a LOT of people have been trying to use a bad link for sometime now and I may have lost all of those people as future readers. 🙁 Hopefully the ones who came to my site with a broken link just looked up the recipe on the search bar but alas, there’s nothing I can do about the past. 

Check your links, maintain your site, double check, triple check. Do backups ( oh dear lord I lost a backup drive just the other week! That’s another story!) So do double backups, triple even. I hope if you are reading this you never have to deal with these issues, but if you have maybe this can help! 

For now, let’s hope all things have settled and I don’t have to fix anything else for awhile. Like a year!