WordPress 404 Plugin

One of WordPress many great built-in functions, is the permalinks function. That nifty function helps you fancy up your URLs, so that they’re easy to understand, both for humans and search engines alike.

Before you ask, let me show you what I think is the best permalinks structure to use, which is the one that I have on all my blogs.

The reason to why I use that permalinks structure is that it gives me the opportunity to place my important keywords as close to the beginning as possible, plus that it’s easy to read and understand.

However, what do you do if you have a blog that has an ugly permalinks structure and would like to change that, without causing a busload of 404-errors? Or maybe you have a static site, which you would like to convert to WordPress, without losing any traffic. Can it really be done in a simple and effective way?

Yes, it can, thanks to a clever little plugin called, Smart 404.

When someone makes a request to your blog, using a URL that cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the info in that URL, attempt to find matching content and redirect the request to it, automatically!

Here’s an example.

Let’s say that you converted your static site to WordPress. On your old site you had a page named hair-shampoos.html, which now naturally causes a 404-error.

Now, if you have Smart 404, it will seamlessly redirect the surfer to its new location, which will be /hair-shampoos/ if you used the permalinks structure from above.

Whenever a request is made to your blog, which generates a 404-error, Smart 404 does a search of your posts, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If Smart 404 finds a match, it will redirect the request to that page, instead of showing the dreadful 404-error.

As you can see, in the picture below, you can also fine tune Smart 404, so that it pays higher notice to tags instead of categories, for instance.

However, if you don’t want to fiddle around with too much, you can just install it and let it do its job. It will work just well with the default options.

I can say that this plugin has helped me a lot, with fixing ugly permalinks and convert static sites to WordPress. So, now you can get those fancy URLs for your blog too, without causing those SEO dreadful 404-errors!

You can download Smart 404 over at the Smart 404 WordPress Plugin page or read more about it here.