How to Setup 301 and 302 Redirects in SiteGround Hosting?

In our previous article, we have discussed complete details about 301 redirects. If you are using WordPress site, it is easy to setup redirects using plugins like Redirection or Yoast SEO premium. However, for all other platforms and HTML websites, the best option is to use htaccess directive. But, accessing .htaccess file using FTP or File Manager and adding correct entries is a complicated task for normal users. Making a small mistake like adding a comma or semicolon will break the entire site and show fatal errors or white screen. If you are using SiteGround hosting then you are at luck. You can easily setup redirect in SiteGround without editing any files.

Setup Redirects in SiteGround Hosting

Before explaining the setup process, remember the following things:

• You can use the redirection setup for WordPress or any other type of website.
• There are no need of plugins or file editing. You do not need SG Optimizer plugin for WordPress sites in order to use the redirect function from hosting account.
• Redirects works from server side smoothly without hassle.

SiteGround Redirects for WordPress Sites?

You may wonder, why you should use redirect from hosting account when there are plenty of free plugins available for this. There are good reasons for this. WordPress plugins will only work when you want to setup redirect within the site’s articles. You can’t setup redirect from a HTML page from subdirectory to one of your WordPress page or vice versa. For example, Redirection plugin will show you a warning when you try to create a redirect with a page from outside your WordPress installation.

You can see the warning message reading “Some servers may be configured to serve file resources directly, preventing a redirect occurring”. Though the plugin will not stop creating a new entry, you can check it will show you error. At the end, the redirect will not work as intended.

Second thing is that WordPress plugins will not work for subdomain and domain to domain redirects. You can easily do this with SiteGround “Domain Redirects” setup. Here are some possible scenarios that works like a charm with SiteGround hosting redirects.

• From one domain to another domain
• Subdirectory to subdomain and vice versa
• Subdirectory or subdomain to main domain and vice versa

Remember, in all these scenarios the sites should be hosted in the same hosting account. As we have checked, regex redirect also works with the setup.

How to Setup Redirects in SiteGround Hosting?

Follow the below step by step instructions to setup 302 or 301 redirects in SiteGround hosting account.

• First, prepare your old and new URLs for the redirects.
• Login to your hosting account and go to “Websites” tab. Here, you will see all the sites available on your hosting account.
• Click on “Site Tools” button under the domain you want to setup the redirect. This will take you to the Site Tools interface.

• Navigate to “Domain” section and then to “Redirects” section.

• Click on “Domain” dropdown to choose your domain or subdomain and enter the URL in the “Path” text box. Here, you need to enter only the slug of your URL without the domain part.

• Select the redirect type as 301 or 302 and enter the new destination URL in “Redirects to” text box. Here, you have to provide the complete URL including the protocol and domain.

• Click on “Create” button to create a redirect.

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Validating the Entry

SiteGround will validate the entry when type. You can see the green outline indicating the entry is valid and red outline with a message showing an error.

However, after creating an entry you should manually test the redirection is working properly by opening the source URL in the browser. It should redirect to the destination path as per your redirection setup in SiteGround.

Managing Redirects

You can view all created entries under “Manage Redirects” section. Each entry will have two options for editing and deleting. Anytime, you can click on the delete icon to remove the entry permanently from the setup. This will disable the redirect and you need to setup again if needed. Similarly, you can click on the pencil icon to edit the entry to change the redirect type from 301 to 302 and vice versa.

Limitation in the Setup

We love this feature as it works well across all your domains and subdomains. However, there are some limitations.

• Source URL is a relative path while the destination is a complete path. It would be appropriate to have both these options as complete path as it works across domains.
• You have only setup 301 and 302 redirects in SiteGround hosting. This is not sufficient when you want to use 307 or any other redirections.
• The list of redirects can easily go long when you have created many entries. It may cause inconvenience suddenly when you want to delete an old entry. There are no search box or reporting to speedup this process.
• There are no options to test the redirect unless you open the source page in browser manually.
• You can’t temporarily disable a redirect for checking purposes. You always need to delete and recreate the entries again.

Final Words

Though there are some limitations in using redirect setup in SiteGround hosting account, this is absolutely a useful function. You can easily create redirect within subdomains, across domains and subdirectories. It will be also useful if SiteGround brings this feature to WordPress sites through SG Optimizer plugin in future.