404 Solution

Redirection is a manual redirect manager — you write the rules, it applies them. That is useful when you know in advance which URLs will break. 404 Solution handles the URLs you don’t know about: it automatically finds the right destination using a 7-engine matching pipeline and a spell-checking algorithm.

The two plugins are complementary. Many sites run both: Redirection for planned migrations and 404 Solution for everything else.

404 to 301 redirects ALL 404 errors to one fixed destination (usually the homepage). 404 Solution finds the actual page the visitor was looking for. Sending visitors to your homepage is poor UX and can create soft 404 problems in Google Search Console.

WP 404 Auto Redirect uses keyword matching, which works when the URL contains recognizable words from a post title. It fails on character-level typos — a URL like /prodcut/ has no keyword that matches “product.”

What HTTP status codes are supported?

Using 410 instead of redirecting deleted content to your homepage produces better results in Google Search Console and prevents soft-404 indexing.

No. The matching pipeline only runs when a genuine 404 occurs — normal page loads are unaffected. For large sites, 404 Solution uses N-gram indexing and caching tables to keep matching fast. Once a redirect is established, subsequent hits are served from the redirect table directly, bypassing the pipeline.

Yes. 404 Solution indexes WooCommerce products, product variations, product categories, and tags. When a product URL changes or a product is deleted, the appropriate redirect is created automatically.

404 Solution detects when a destination post is trashed or deleted and flags the redirect. Redirects pointing to deleted content are highlighted in the redirect table so nothing slips through unnoticed. The daily maintenance cron automatically removes orphaned auto-redirects.

Yes. 404 Solution imports CSV and JSON in the Redirection plugin’s export format. It can also directly import from Rank Math, Yoast SEO, AIOSEO, and Safe Redirect Manager’s database tables from the Tools tab.

Yes. IP addresses are hashed using a one-way algorithm before storage; the original IP is never written to disk. Log retention limits are configurable. By default no data is transmitted to external servers. The “Help the developer by sending error logs” admin checkbox (default off) and the uninstall feedback modal are the only opt-in paths that send data to the plugin author’s reports server. See the plugin’s privacy policy stub at docs/privacy.md for the retention period for rows keyed by site_url, the data-subject erasure path, and the processing region for the reports endpoint.

Yes. Manual redirect rules support full regular expression syntax for source URLs. Capture-group replacements can use either full HTTP(S) destination URLs or site-relative paths such as /archive/$1 .

Yes. 404 Solution detects the active language from the multilingual plugin’s API and resolves redirect destinations to the correct translated version automatically.

Yes. 404 Solution includes WP-CLI subcommands for listing, creating, deleting, importing, and exporting redirects — useful for scripted migrations and DevOps workflows.

Yes. 404 Solution is ideal for site migrations: slug-change auto-detection, URL typo correction (strips .html , .php , .asp ), hierarchical category path resolution, and regex redirects for bulk pattern changes.

Yes. Go to Settings → 404 Solution → Redirect all unhandled 404s to and select your preferred fallback page.

Log cleanup is automatic. Configure maximum log size under Options → General Settings → Maximum log disk usage . You can also manually clear logs from the Logs page.

Yes. Use Options → Advanced Settings → Files and Folders Ignore Strings to add paths to ignore. Per-post and per-term exclusion is also available via the edit screen checkbox.

Edit the post/page and check the “Exclude from 404 Solution redirects” checkbox in the sidebar. Category and tag terms can also be excluded via term meta on the edit screen.

Check out AJ Experience for other useful tools and resources.