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WordPress Full Site Redirect: A Complete Guide

Moving a WordPress website to a new domain comes with a set of challenges, one of them being losing out on SEO rankings. But you can avoid that with a full site redirect. This involves transferring the entire website from an old domain to a new one.

When a visitor tries to visit your website through the old URL, they’ll automatically be redirected to the new domain. With this, you can retain all of the backlinks that you’ve built over the months or years. In this guide, we explain how you can do a full site redirect in WordPress.

How to Do a Full Site Redirect in WordPress: Step-by-Step

For full site redirect, you need to use a plugin called All In One SEO (AIOSEO). It’s a popular plugin for everything SEO used by over 3 million WordPress websites.

The plugin has a redirection manager that allows you to handle redirects with ease and in line with search engine guidelines. To start using this manager, you’d have to purchase the AIOSEO Pro version.

To get started, you need to install and activate the plugin. Then go to the AIOSEO plugin page and purchase a pro plan. Then grab the license key. Then follow these steps:
  • Navigate to All in One SEO > General Settings
  • Enter the license key
  • Then navigate into All in One SEO > Redirects
  • Click on Activate Redirects
  • After you’ve activated the addon, open the Full Site Redirect tab under Redirects
  • Click on the toggle that says ‘Relocate Site’ and it’d open up more options
  • You’ll find the ‘Relocate to domain’ field where you need to enter the new URL for your website. Enter the new location and click on ‘Save Changes
It will redirect every page to the new location except the login page and admin page.

To ensure that the full site redirect was successful, enter the old URL in the browser. If it redirects you to the new location automatically, then the redirect was successful.

Fix Broken Links

When you move the WordPress website to a new location, there’s a chance that some links will break during the process. So they will display the 404 error page.

To correct these, you need to head over to the All in One SEO > Redirects section and then into the Settings tab. There, you need to enable 404 Logs and Redirect Logs by enabling the toggle.

The plugin will begin to record the 404 errors on your new location. Now when you visit ‘404 Logs’ tab under redirects, you’ll see the broken links. Next to those links you’ll see an option called ‘Add Redirect’. In the next section, you’ll add target URL and select the redirection type.

Lastly, click on ‘Add Redirect’ button to apply the changes. Now all the broken links should get fixed.

So that’s how you carry out a full site redirect in WordPress with no broken links.
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