Slim SEO 3.16 is a major update, where we added new features for redirection and 404 link monitoring. These features allow you to create redirects for your website with various conditions, and monitor 404 links that users visit the website. You also can create redirects for 404 links as well.
For the full documentation about these features, please visit this page. Below are the overview of this update.
Creating and managing redirects with ease
Redirection is an important feature in any SEO plugin. With redirection, you can create nice URL such as "domain.com/product" to redirect to a product landing page with marketing campaign parameters in the URL. It also helps you cloak affiliate links, or shorten links that can be shared in social networks.
Slim SEO now allows you to create redirects with simple steps. You can create 301 redirect or 302 redirect with regular expression or other rules:
After creating redirects, the plugin provides a nice UI to manage redirects:
All the UI is created with React, a great Javascript framework that's built-in WordPress. React allows us to create interactive and user-friendly interface which will improve the user experience.
Monitoring 404 links and creating redirects for them
There are situations that you delete a post or share a wrong link on social networks. When users visit these links, they'll see a 404 page! Normally, a 404 page contains only a message like "Oops, the page you are looking for doesn't exist", which is not helpful to users, because they don't see the content they want. That's bad for user experience.
With this update, Slim SEO allows you to monitor all 404 links, so you know what links are wrong on your website.
You'll see details about 404 links such as hits and created/updated time. These details are useful, so you can see which 404 links are widely used.
And you can decide whether to create redirects for 404 links! This is important because you can redirect users to the correct URL instead of a not-found page. This brings users to the right page and of course, improve the experience.
Other useful redirection types
In version 3.16, Slim SEO also add more controls for other redirection types, including:
- Redirecting from non-www to www and vice-versa
- Force trailing slash for URL
- Redirect all 404 to the homepage or a custom URL of your choice
These are tiny features, but might cause serious issues if not set up correctly. With this, we hope to reduce the confusions and problems for users.
Performance wise
Monitoring 404 links and doing redirects might cause a problem if you have a large site with thousands of posts. We know this problem and take care of this for you. All the code and data is carefully optimized, so it affects the performance at least.
Technically, for 404 links, we use a custom table to log all of them. Using a custom table allows us to improve the performance in general comparing to use a custom post type. You also have options to only log 404 links in a certain period and remove the table when not needed.
With this update, we hope Slim SEO is more useful for users. The ultimate goal is getting a higher ranking in search result pages and providing a great user experience. If you like this feature, please share this post or leave us a 5* review.
Where are you keeping the content when we add a redirect? I do not see it in PhpMyAdmin database.
Thank you
The data is stored in an option in the wp_options table.