The video assumes you're already familiar with the reasons for creating redirects and focuses on the step-by-step process to implement them. It covers various methods in WordPress, including using plugins, manually editing the .htaccess file, or making changes at the server level. Squarespace users are shown how to set up redirects via URL mappings in the developer tools section. The video emphasizes using 301 redirects, the most common type for permanent changes.
Creating redirects very simple to do, but also very important. You really have to be sure that you avoid any mistakes because the potential downside of making a mistake with this is it's very bad for us. Yeah. It was bad for users.
It's bad for everything. So organization here, I think is really important.
I'm going to show you how I do it. I've developed this method after…years of having trouble and making mistakes. It's very easy to do.
It's just it's you can see on screen here - Every single time you create a redirect, every page that needs a redirect is going to have an individual line. So you're just giving a simple line of code to Google or a web browser when the person comes to visit. And you're saying a few things, you're saying, Hey, this page here at this URL, there is a three zero one or a three zero two redirect to this other page. That's it. There's three elements.
The format is a little bit different if you're doing it on WordPress versus Squarespace, show it. You're going to use the same format as WordPress, but I highly recommend you keep track of if you have more than one or two redirects that you were doing…
first, put them into a spreadsheet like this, then you can literally add when you are finished. Let's say you have a bunch of these. Imagine these are all different pages. Once you're done with this, you can just take these fields…
Copy and then go paste them into Yoast or directly into Squarespace, etcetera. But what you want to do in terms of the format, I'm going to start with WordPress and then I'll show you Squarespace.
This first one is going to be redirect three zero one. That's always the same. You're going to put in your old page, the one that is going to be redirected, and you don't need to put in the full URL, just do everything after the dot com.
And it must begin with a slash, then the name of the old page and then the full URL of the new page. Then I would literally just take, if I were just doing one URL, I would take those copy, co paste it into the Yoast Squarespace. Like I said, the format is a little bit different, but we're still going to have those three elements. We're telling Squarespace, we're telling Google and browsers the old URL, the new URL, and it's a three zero one redirect. And
With Squarespace, you put the old URL first.
Then we have this, actually we have this little arrow sign and it's just a hyphen and then a greater than sign. And then again, the full…new URL. And then at the end we have the directive three zero one. So in this case, however many redirects I want to do, I would literally copy those, go over to Squarespace and just paste those into my Squarespace settings, wherever you place redirects. And that changes occasionally used to be one place.
Now it's a different place. Once you get to wherever it is pasting them is going to be the same.
I recommend to figure out where that is. Just ask Gemini or Google or chat GPT or Claude for the most current status, or just go straight to the Squarespace blog, do a Google search, and I'm sure that the Squarespace blog will have a direct link there. And
I recommend keeping these on file for yourself, especially if you're using WordPress, because a lot of times what happens, or sometimes what happens with WordPress is you might be using a plugin to install these like Yoast or there are other plugins.
And what can happen with plugins is they get old, they get outdated, they can conflict with other plugins. Maybe they're deleted by accident. If any of those things happen, you're going to lose all your redirects. And if you do that, you won't be able to find them in. You won't, there's no history of them.
So if you have them on a file here that you can save, you can always come back, get the originals and then repaste them into WordPress. If you need it.
Same thing with Squarespace, it's less likely that there's going to be some mishap and you will,
lose your redirects within Squarespace, but it could happen. So I recommend creating a spreadsheet. You can make a copy of this spreadsheet or literally…just copy this field to create a new spreadsheet, make one of your own stored in Google drive, or if you use Excel or whatever, and then you're good to go. Okay.
I hope this helps.
