Moving a page shouldn't mean losing its traffic
You renamed a product. Restructured a category. Changed the slug on your most-linked blog post. Every old URL is now returning a 404 — to Google, to the backlinks you've earned, to anyone who bookmarked the page.
The fix is a 301 redirect: a one-line instruction telling browsers and search engines "this moved there, permanently." Every WordPress site needs this. Most admins install an entire plugin just to write one.
What most people do instead
A better way: one command per redirect
Open the TrueCommander navigator. Type redirect -from=/old-url -to=/new-url. Enter. Done.
The command auto-registers itself as a startup command, so the redirect fires on every page load. Re-issue with the same -from to update the destination. Pass -remove=true to delete it.
Case-insensitive path matching. A request to /Old-Product also redirects. Query strings on the incoming request are automatically forwarded to the destination, so ?utm_source=email isn't lost.
How it works
The command hooks template_redirect and compares the current request path to every registered redirect. If a match is found, it issues a wp_redirect() with the configured status code (301 or 302) and forwards any incoming query string.
redirect -from=/blog/old -to=/blog/new. Defaults to 301.-from updates the destination. -remove=true deletes the entry entirely.| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
-from | Source path (e.g., /old-page) |
-to | Destination path or full URL |
-status | 301 (permanent, default) or 302 (temporary) |
-remove | true to delete the redirect entry |
| Matching | Case-insensitive. Query strings preserved on redirect. |
| Can be used in |
Real example
You migrated from an old blog platform and now all your old URLs need to point to their new locations. Instead of editing .htaccess with 47 redirect rules (and praying you don't typo), you build a macro.
The macro loops over a list of old→new URL pairs and runs redirect for each. Ten seconds of execution, 47 redirects registered. Old links on Google, old backlinks from other sites, old emails with stale URLs — all now land on the right page.
Six months later, you retire one of the old URLs entirely. You run redirect -from=/old-post-5 -remove=true. Gone.