Author Archive: Matt Russell

This post was written by Matt Russell CEO of WebHostingBuzz, who offer Shared, Reseller, and VPS web hosting services. You can follow them on twitter @webhostingbuzz or visit their site at http://www.webhostingbuzz.com.

Managing 301 Redirects in WordPress

Published December 14th, 2012 in WordPress - 3 Comments

A 301 redirect is the HTTP status code returned by your browser when a web page is requested pointing the browser to go to a different location. The status code everyone will be most familiar with is a 404 which indicates that the requested page could not be found. The two main types of redirect are 301 and 302 the difference on the surface is minor but important, a 302 is a temporary redirect while a 301 is permanent. While the average user is unlikely to notice the difference search engines treat them very differently; a 301 passes SEO value (or ‘PageRank’) on to its redirect target while a 302 does not.

Other forms of redirect include Meta Refresh where the redirect is handled on a page rather than on a server level and 307 which is a HTTP 1.1 successor to a 302 redirect.
There are a number of reasons why you may need to permanently redirect to a new page including moving to a new domain, changing site structure or merging content, while a 302 would be used for displaying a clean URL for example when a session ID is used. The type of redirect a web page is using can be checked using a HTTP request and response header tool such as web-sniffer.net or a plugin for Firefox such as HTTP LiveHeaders.

7 WordPress Setup Tips

Published August 13th, 2012 in WordPress - 7 Comments

WordPress is an immensely powerful blogging and website platform. There are, however, some important steps to carry out as soon as possible and some elementary mistakes to avoid once WordPress has been installed. This is by no means a complete guide but it includes a number of useful tips to help make your WordPress site as effective as possible.

1. Permalink Structure

A common critique of WordPress is that its default URL structure for posts is quite weak, with each post being given a page ID such as “http://site.com/?p=123”. This can give a bad impression if it is linked to from another site as it doesn’t give a good idea of what a user can expect to find and in some situations could look spammy.

To remedy this in the WordPress dashboard go to Settings, then Permalinks and you will find the default settings. Change this to Post Name – the second to last option on the page and you will achieve a much cleaner and more user friendly URL.