404 errors issues occur when a website visitor attempts to access a specific page on your website or when your domain does not exist. These 404 pages errors are the result of poor user experiences, which can hurt your SEO rankings. Users are likely to leave your site and visit a competitor’s website.
If you don’t want that to happen, there is a simple technique to track and reroute 404 errors on your WordPress website.
Redirection Plugin
Use Redirection Plugin to keep track of 404 pages and redirect them. This is quite advance for some beginners so follow the direction carefully to get rid of problems.
Download the plugin and install it to your WordPress.
You can locate the installed plugin settings in Tools > Redirection and scroll down below then click the “Start Setup” button.
It shows the basic setup. You can enable functions like “Monitor permalink changes in WordPress posts and pages” and also “Keep a log of all redirects and 404 errors”. Then click “Continue Setup”.
After the setup, it will try to test the Rest API status and if the result is Good, you can proceed to click “Finish Setup”.
You can now start adding new redirection conditions. If you want more advanced options just click the “Gear Icon” button.
To add the new redirection, provide the “Source URL” which is the relative URL you want to redirect from.
Then, select “Query Parameters” like before, and adding a Title to describe the purpose of the redirection.
After that, pick the Match option from the drop-down. You will see many options, including URL only, URL and referrer, URL and user agent, and URL and login status.
In most situations, you require to use URL and referrer. Essentially because if you notice some 404 requests for a particular page, then it’s possible not a user typo error, but rather it has to be a person who is linking to the wrong URL.
Now, whenever someone else connects to the broken URL or a post that you moved, it will redirect them to the new page.
Next, make sure that your action is ‘Redirect to URL’. The other choices are difficult and need advanced technical knowledge.
In the redirection type, you need to pick a selection from the HTTP code drop-down (like 301 – Moved Permanently).
Finally, fill up the Matched Target field with the target URL. Then press the ‘Add Redirect’ button. You can check the new URL to ensure that the redirection is operating properly.
The plugin also allows you to track 404 error logs. Simply click the ‘404s’ tab at the top, and the plugin will display the most recent 404 problems that occurred on your site since you installed the plugin.