The most common error that takes away your traffic is 404 i.e. PAGE NOT FOUND error because as soon as the visitor sees it, he closes the browser’s tab to visit somewhere else.
Now you know how to conditionally redirect any link on WordPress but are you really aware of every 404 PAGE NOT FOUND error that is snatching away the visitors of your website?
What if you have a big website with lots of posts and you are not sure what links may cause a page-not-found-error? One way that can solve almost all of your problems with dead links is redirecting every user on your website to the content he wants to read.
In order words, you can convert every expired link into an intelligently working link on your website.
So how is that possible?
You just need to install-activate a WordPress plugin called Link Fixer, once activated the plugin automatically fixes all active and possible 404 errors on your website.
How does It work for the visitor?
The plugin searches the database to find any of the values especially the words that match the dead link requested by the client. Once, it finds the best match, it sends the user to that page. As a result, the user sees the content he was looking up for.
How does it work for search engine crawlers?
Google and other search engine spiders simply find the 301 redirects so they can update their results accordingly.
The best solution for users moving to WordPress
The plugin is a great solution for users planning to move their website from any platform to WordPress. Where sometimes the conversion process removes words such as “the” and “a” from the permalinks and generates many 404-page-not-found errors.
It also offers you some settings on your dashboard Settings -> Link Fixer page to let you modify values and set your own parameters.
Even if you don’t make any settings. Simply activating the plugin will get rid of every 404 error on your WordPress site.
How to know that your links are fixed?
Simply mistype any permalink or temporarily add a broken link somewhere on your website then click that link to see how intelligently you are redirected to the right page.