Redirect Manager — Create, Monitor and Maintain Redirects Without Touching Your Server

Every WordPress site accumulates redirects over time. Old URLs that got renamed. Pages that moved during a redesign. Blog posts consolidated into guides. Product pages retired after a catalog change.

Most sites manage this with a redirect plugin — create a rule, point the old URL somewhere new, move on. The problem is that over months and years those redirect lists grow, chains develop, obsolete rules pile up, and nobody really knows what’s still needed and what’s just dead weight.

Redirect Manager is built to solve the whole problem, not just the creation part.

What it does

Redirect Manager lets you create and manage HTTP redirects directly inside WordPress without touching your server configuration. The two redirect types you’ll use most are covered — 301 for permanent moves that pass link equity, and 302 for temporary redirects that don’t.

Creating a redirect is straightforward:

/old-page → /new-page

For more complex situations, Redirect Manager supports regex-enabled pattern redirects. Instead of creating individual rules for hundreds of URLs, one pattern rule handles an entire structure:

/blog/(.*) → /articles/$1

This is particularly useful during site migrations, blog restructures, or any time you’re moving a large volume of URLs at once — without needing to write server config rules or touch .htaccess.

Where most redirect plugins stop

A typical redirect plugin creates rules and stops there. Redirect Manager goes further because unmanaged redirects cause real problems.

Redirect chains happen when one redirect points to another, which points to another. Page A goes to Page B which goes to Page C. Each hop slows crawling, dilutes link equity, and adds unnecessary latency for visitors. Redirect Manager detects these chains so you can collapse them to a single direct rule.

Redirect loops are worse — Page A points to Page B, Page B points back to Page A. The browser spins indefinitely and the URL becomes inaccessible. Redirect Manager prevents these from being created in the first place.

Hit tracking shows you how often each redirect is being triggered. This tells you which old URLs are still being visited, which redirects are doing real work, and which ones have gone cold and can be cleaned up. Most sites have redirect rules created years ago that haven’t fired once since. Hit tracking makes that visible.

Connected to the rest of Blacklight

Redirect Manager isn’t an isolated tool. It’s part of how Blacklight handles site health end to end.

Lightcrawl finds broken URLs during crawls. Redirect Manager is where you fix them. Pulse monitors how redirect health changes over time. The workflow closes the loop — detection, fix, monitoring — without jumping between separate tools or plugins.

This is the practical difference between a redirect generator and a redirect maintenance system. Most plugins handle the first half. Redirect Manager handles both.

One place for everything

Instead of digging through server configs, plugin settings across multiple tools, or a spreadsheet someone made three years ago, Redirect Manager gives you a central overview of every redirect on your site — the source URL, destination, redirect type, and hit count — in one place.

That visibility is what keeps redirect systems from becoming the tangled mess most sites end up with.