(Without Losing the Traffic They Used to Get)
Every WordPress site accumulates 404 errors over time. You rename a category. You restructure your permalinks. You delete an old landing page after a rebrand. Each of those actions can leave behind a URL that used to work — and might still be linked to from other sites, old bookmarks, or your own internal links — now returning nothing but a dead end.
Why this actually costs you something
A 404 isn’t just an inconvenience for the person who clicks it. If that URL had ranked in search results, or had other sites linking to it, all the authority that page had built up effectively evaporates the moment it stops resolving. A redirect is how you carry that authority forward to wherever the content actually lives now, instead of throwing it away.
301 vs. 302: the difference actually matters
A 301 redirect tells search engines “this content has permanently moved here” — it passes ranking authority to the new URL and updates search engines’ understanding of where the content lives now.
A 302 redirect signals “this is temporary” — search engines keep the original URL indexed as the canonical version, expecting it to come back.
Using a 302 for something that’s actually permanent is a common mistake that quietly prevents ranking authority from transferring the way it should. If a page has moved for good, it needs a 301.
Finding your actual 404s
Before you can redirect anything, you need to know what’s actually broken. Google Search Console’s Coverage report will show you 404s Google has already discovered. But there can also be 404s Google hasn’t hit yet — internal links you’ve forgotten about, old inbound links from other sites you don’t monitor. That’s a blind spot worth closing separately.
How Sanctuary Tiger SEO handles this
The free plugin includes a database-backed redirect manager: set up 301 or 302 redirects, with wildcard pattern matching for restructuring an entire URL pattern at once (useful when, say, an entire old blog category needs to point somewhere new), and hit counts so you can see which redirects are actually being used and which ones you can eventually clean up.
Separately, a built-in broken link scanner checks your own site for dead internal links — the ones inside your own content pointing at your own now-missing pages — so you’re not relying purely on Search Console to surface problems you created yourself.
Here’s what that looks like in practice — the Redirect Manager screen, with a redirect already active:
redirect-manager-example.png Caption: The Redirect Manager showing an active 301 redirect with real hit tracking — 3 visitors have already been caught by this one and sent to the right page instead of a 404. Alt text: WordPress Redirect Manager screen showing the Add Redirect form, CSV bulk import option, and a table of one active 301 redirect with 3 hits
The takeaway
404s aren’t something to fix once and forget — they accumulate continuously as a normal part of running and evolving a site. Treating redirects as ongoing maintenance rather than a one-time cleanup project is what actually keeps the authority your old pages built from leaking away.
Get the free redirect manager on WordPress.org →
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I always use a 301 redirect instead of a 302? For anything permanent, yes — a 301 passes ranking authority to the new URL. Use a 302 only when the move is genuinely temporary.
Will Search Console show me every 404 on my site? It shows 404s Google has already discovered, but not necessarily broken internal links Google hasn’t crawled yet — a separate internal link scanner covers that blind spot.
Can I redirect an entire category of URLs at once instead of one by one? Yes — wildcard pattern matching lets you redirect a whole URL pattern in one rule, useful when restructuring an entire section of a site.
