Error 404 is bad for your website as it takes visitors and search engines on pages they were not looking for. It not only happens when you have broken links on your website or when you change the permalink structure but also when someone mistypes your post URL or links to an errored URL.
The good thing is that you can fix all types of 404-not-found errors on your WordPress Website simply by activating a plugin called Link Fixer.
It works for all broken links that include broken post links, in-post links, page links, text widget links, and every link on your website or on some other website pointing to a broken page on your website.
Fixes All Broken Links In One Click
All you have to do is install and activate the Link Fixer plugin. Upon activation, it automatically redirects pages where WordPress fails to find any valid permalink by itself.
And before your website generates a 404 error page, the plugin tries to locate your posts having similar words. As a result, all active and possible 404 errors get fixed across your website.
How Link Fixer Works?
The plugin does this by searching the database attempting to find any of the word values matching from the bad link in the process. After finding the best match, rather than issuing a 404 error page, it sends a redirect to that page, and hence the user sees the content they were looking for. Whereas, Google and other search engine spiders see the 301 redirects and update their results accordingly.
It is a very useful plugin while migrating form other blogging platforms to WordPress where the conversion process automatically removes words such as “the” and “a” from the permalinks and generates many not-found errors on your website.
The plugin also offers you some settings on your admin area dashboard Settings -> Link Fixer page where you can change any values to set your own parameters.
How To Test If Broken Links Are Fixed?
Simply mistype any permalink or temporarily add a broken link somewhere on your website then click that link to see how quickly this plugin works.