Today I want to focus on a very simple problem that’s pretty easy to solve. This problem occurs when using the Redirection plugin for WordPress and attempting to redirect .html or .htm pages and having it not work. This could also apply to any instance of a static page ending in .php, .txt, .zip, or whatever else you might have. This is quite a bit different than an issue you might have where your .htaccess file never works with WordPress, but it can still be confusing if you don’t understand what’s happening.
Symptom
You set up your redirection rule in the Redirection plugin to send visitors to a specific .html file to a new location. However, when you go to visit that page, instead of being redirected, you see the content of that old page! This is no good.
Solution
The solution is extremely simple. You see, for a regular redirection rule to function, it is a requirement that an actual, physical file does not exist at that exact location. You will need to delete the file that exists there.
For instance, let’s say you have a file, located at example.com/about.html
. You want to redirect that to your home page. If, on your server, you still have a file in the site root called about.html, your redirect will not work until you delete that file. It’s as simple as that!
Easy stuff. It might not be obvious that you need to delete the file until you’ve read this, but hopefully now you won’t have any problems.
5 Comments on “Redirection Plugin Not Working for HTML Pages”
What I found that the issue is with trailing slashes, not always with the html pages itself.
Not working for me. I deleted the page, deleted it permanently from the trash, cleared everything from my browser cache….and get a 404 error. Redirection plugin is not working for me 🙁
This page:
http://www.bigpicturestories.com/הצלם-האנגלי/
Ought to redirect to:
http://www.bigpicturestories.com/il/
..if you’re seeing the correct redirection, please tell me!
It is working for me!
Thank you! Very helpful.
It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t. Duh.
I appreciate you posting this.
Glad I could help!