3 Reasons to Use a Temporary Redirect on Your Site (and How to Do It)

A temporary redirect is just as it sounds, offering non-permanent redirection from one URL to another. There’s a number of reasons you may require this technique, but no matter the reason, a plugin like Pretty Links can help you to implement it.

In this post, we’ll discuss temporary redirects, including when to use them and three reasons why they're used. Additionally, we'll show you how to implement temporary redirects with Pretty Links. Let’s get started!

What Is a Temporary Redirect? (and When You Should Use One)

URL redirection is a technique used to make web pages available at more than one location.

There are two main redirection types – temporary and permanent. And each serves its own purpose. Permanent redirects, for example, are great for permanent website moves. Temporary redirects are better for short-term events, such as site maintenance.

Both work the same way, redirecting search engines and site traffic to a newly established link. But there is a key difference. During a temporary redirect, search engines will continually refer to the original URL. Once that URL is back in use, the original connection will be re-established and search engine crawls will continue as normal.

3 Reasons to Use Temporary Redirects on Your Site

With a better understanding of temporary redirects, let’s dig into a few reasons for using them on your site.

1. Implement A/B Testing

When you set up your web pages, you may not always be sure you’ve created the best version possible. That’s where A/B testing comes in.

Simply put, A/B testing is a process where two different versions of the same web page are compared. Half of the page’s traffic will be sent to version A, while the other half will be sent to version B. Comparisons are typically made regarding conversion rates and other stats such as bounce rate and time spent on a page.

A/B testing is a great way to learn how to improve your site. And, with a temporary redirect, there’s no harm to your site's search engine rankings during testing.

2. Maintain or Update Your Site Without Disruption

Site maintenance keeps your site running smoothly, ensures tight security, and checks that SEO is up to date. Although, the maintenance process can be a bit involved. This can put your site out of commission for a few hours during the bulk of the process.

With temporary redirects, however, you can perform site maintenance while also limiting site unavailability. This means site visitors won't be put out by the downtime, and search engine bots will hold off on-site crawling until the temporary redirect has been removed and the original URL is restored.

3. Create a Page Without Impacting SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process involved in improving website and web page position on search engine results pages (SERPs). While you typically want to have your web pages available for search engine bots to crawl, there may be a few reasons to block such activities.

One of the main reasons is site testing or development. During the early stages of a web page’s creation, having it rank for SEO may not be particularly helpful for your site.

Another common reason is client feedback, enabling you to create a page without it being included in your site's rankings. This is commonly used by website developers, but you can also use this technique if you’re a content writer, copywriter, or other creative.

How Pretty Links Can Help You Implement Temporary Redirects

While the main feature of Pretty Links is link shortening, it has a variety of other features, including both permanent and temporary redirect options.

With Pretty Links, setting up temporary redirects is simple. To begin, head to Pretty Links > Add New Link on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard.

First, add the redirect URL (the URL which all traffic will be redirected to) to the Target URL box:

Then, add a custom slug to the Pretty Links box. This is the link URL that will be requested by site visitors, but they’ll be sent to the target URL instead.

Now, keep in mind, if you already have a page in your WordPress site with the desired Pretty Links slug, you'll have to edit the original page’s URL. This is because Pretty Links will not allow the creation of an identical URL. But don’t worry. The slug can always be changed back once you’re done using the temporary redirect.

Conclusion

As we’ve discussed, temporary redirects can be helpful for a number of reasons. Fortunately, such redirects are easy to implement with a link management tool like Pretty Links.

In the above post, we went over three reasons to use temporary redirects on your site. To recap, they include:

1. Implementing A/B testing.
2. Maintaining or updating your site without disruption.
3. Creating a page without impacting SEO.

Create your first redirect with Pretty Links TODAY!

Do you have any questions about temporary redirects or how Pretty Links can help? Let us know in the comments section!

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