Introduction

During the lifetime of a website, the URLs of pages often change. If no countermeasures are in place, users will attempt to access pages that no longer exist when browsing your site. Typically, when this occurs an error page is returned. This is inefficient and impacts the user experience. When multiple missing pages or 404 / 410 HTTP status codes are returned, the overall SEO ranking is negatively affected.

Changing URLs can have multiple reasons, sometimes the name of something changes and the URL should reflect that or pages are restructured on the site.

There are many reasons as to why URLs are changed. This can include a restructure of the site's pages and also occurs when the name of a page is changed. and the URL in turn changes as well to reflect this.

HTTP redirects act as an important measure to guide users (and bots) to new pages. This often happens in the background without the user noticing it because the browser will automatically resolve the redirect. This works similar to a forwarding request when you move house and your address changes.

For more technical information on how redirects work, visit MDN Web Docs Redirections in HTTP.

For more information about the types of redirects, see HTTP status codes

What does it do?

The TYPO3 system extension EXT:redirects handles redirects within a TYPO3 site.

Features:

  • Manually create redirects in the backend. The redirect information is stored in the sys_redirect table.
  • View and edit existing redirect records in the redirects backend module.
  • Automatic redirect creation on slug changes (based on site configuration).
  • Console commands to check the integrity and cleanup existing redirects.
  • System reports that display information about any conflicting redirects.

Conventions

Visit the Basics page found at the end of this document for a general definition of terms.

When describing parts of the user interface, we use the gui label to mark texts within the UI.

Common names are formatted in italics (though this is not used everywhere to ease readability).

Sometimes the topic of a paragraph is marked in bold to ease skimming of pages for relevant content.