Redirects
When moving or removing pages from your website, it is very important to consider the user experience, as encountering such error messages can be frustrating.
If you changed a page’s URL, moved its content, or removed the page content in favour of another page, use the redirect tool in WebPublish to send users to another page of your choosing.
How to create a redirect
- You can create redirects only FROM pages under your subdomain. In the case of this site, the redirect tool is used only to manage pages under queensu.ca/webpublish.
- You can redirect any URL under your subdomain TO any other page or document published on the web.
![[screenshot if redirect interface]](/webpublish/sites/wpswww/files/Images/Tutorials/Creating%20and%20Editing%20Content/redirect-1.jpg)
- In the Edit view of a page, locate the URL Redirects tool within the page manager options on the right side of the page.
- Select Add URL redirect. This takes you out to a page in the Configuration area of the site -- i.e. the redirect is not actually hosted on the page you started on, but using this link will automatically embed this pages node ID into the "To" field on the next screen.
![[screenshot of user interface]](/webpublish/sites/wpswww/files/Images/Tutorials/Creating%20and%20Editing%20Content/redirect-2.png)
- For the Path field, enter the page that you want directed.
You can use either the human readable URL (or "alias") or the node ID.
An easy way to find the node ID for a page, when logged into the site, is to navigate to the page and hover over the Edit link. - For the To field, enter the page (either internal or external to your site) that you want your user to go to. See screen tips for some additional options.
- For Redirect status, the default value is "301 Moved Permanently." Refer to this list of HTTP status codes for an explanation of the other options.
- Select Save
- Enter the former URL into the browser to test.
Custom 404 error pages
Ensure that you have a custom 404 error page set up in your new site. A custom 404 error page is a page hosted by and personalized to your site that lets the user know that the URL they requested is not available.
How to make a 404 page in WebPublish
- Create a Basic page and enter your content
- Send a request to ITS to ask the WebPublish team to configure it as your 404.