In this tutorial I want to show you a helpful plugin for your WordPress website to redirect 404 Page to the homepage.
It is recommended to do so for 2 reasons. The first reason is that it provides a better user experience for your website visitors.
Nobody likes to end up on a 404 error page if an incorrect or outdated URL is used. By redirecting the 404 pages, visitors will always return to the homepage. Another reason is that it has benefits in terms of SEO.
You can download and activate the free 404 redirect WordPress plugin in seconds.
In this tutorial I’ll show you exactly how to do that.
Watch tutorial on YouTube
Install Redirect 404 page to homepage for WordPress
To install the free WordPress 404 redirect to homepage plugin you need to go to the plugins option and click on the Add new button over here.
Now search for 404 Redirect. Now you see this plugin which has over 200,000 active installations.
Click on Install now to install the plugin. Wait for a couple of seconds. And once it’s done, you can click on the blue Activate button.
Now you can see that the plugin has been edited to the list of all the plugins that I have installed for this website. Go to the settings option, and here you can leave everything on the default settings.
You can see the 404-redirection status is enabled. So that’s good because they you know that it works.
Example of redirect 404 page to homepage for WordPress in action
Now I will show you how it works. Therefore, I will deactivate the plug so it’s no longer active.
If I now enter a URL that does not exist and then we’ll see what happens. Now you can see this message. This page can be found. It looks like nothing was found at this location.
This is not a good experience for users of your website. And also, as I mentioned it is not good for SEO because Google will recognize this and this can impact your ranking.
So now I’m going to activate the 404 redirect WordPress plugin again. Always make sure to purge the cache after you activate the plugin.
Now let me go back to the Incognito tab again. And if I now enter some random characters again and hit enter, you can see that it redirects back to the homepage of the website instead of showing the error message.
I hope this tutorial is helpful. It that’s the case make sure to subscribe to the channel and drop a like and comment.
Thanks, and I hope to see you back in the next tutorial!
In the video tutorial I will explain everything in more detail, and you can watch it on YouTube over here.
If you don’t want to redirect visitors to the homepage you can also design a custom 404 page with Elementor.
Check out this tutorial to learn which free WordPress plugins are recommended for any website.
For security reasons and performance of your site it’s recommended to keep your themes and plugins updated.
Check out the tutorials below to learn which free WordPress plugins you can use to optimise the security of your website: