How to Use Rank Math’s 404 Monitor & Redirections Tool to Recover Lost Traffic in 2025?

Rank Math’s 404 Monitor and Redirections are two incredibly helpful tools for recovering your lost site traffic! Want to know how?

The 404 Monitor module helps you identify broken links (404 errors), and the Redirections tool lets you instantly fix these issues by creating meaningful redirections.

By doing so, you eliminate the dead ends users might encounter while navigating your site and provide a smooth experience they can enjoy and trust.

This guide offers you a step-by-step process to make the best use of these tools to deliver a great user experience and win back your lost audience.

So, let’s begin!

What is a 404 Error? – An Overview

First, let’s understand 404 errors and then site redirection.

Imagine someone clicks on an old blog post link to your website. However, a ‘404 – Page Not Found’ message greets them instead.

Disappointed, they leave. That could be your loyal reader, potential lead, or even customer, lost in seconds.

Now, multiply that by dozens of broken links across your site. Frustrating! 

A 404 error is a standard HTTP status code. When a page or resource you or your visitors are trying to access can’t be found on the server, this error occurs.

Simply put, it’s a common message site visitors see when they click a broken link or enter a URL that no longer exists.

Let’s break it down more precisely!

For example, someone tries to visit ‘www.example.com/old-blog.’ Suppose that the page has been removed, renamed, or an incorrect URL is entered. Then, the server will return a 404 error.

Most websites display a ‘404 – Page Not Found’ message. Servers also state, ‘Sorry, but what you’re looking for isn’t here.’ In addition, this page may also have a custom design or helpful links to guide users back. 

While it’s not a critical issue, too many 404 errors can affect user experience and SEO performance. This may cause you to lose your site traffic.

The good news? You can fix or redirect these errors to keep visitors engaged and search engines happy.

Check out why 404 errors occur in-depth from this guide.

What Do You Mean By Site Redirection?

Now, let’s dive into site redirection!

Site redirection involves sending your users and search engines from one URL to another. It’s a technique applied when a web page has been moved, deleted, or its URL has been altered.

Instead of landing on a 404 error page, your visitor is automatically taken to a new or relevant page. This helps maintain a smooth browsing experience and preserves any SEO value from the original URL.

For instance, ‘www.example.com/old-blog’ is no longer active. Then, you can redirect it to ‘www.example.com/new-blog,’ so users still reach useful content.

Redirections come in different types, like 301, 302, and 307, each serving a specific purpose. When used correctly, redirection helps keep your site organized, user-friendly, and search engine-friendly.

Both 404 monitoring and redirection are possible with Rank Math. Learn that next!

Understanding the Rank Math’s 404 Monitor and Redirection Tool

Rank Math is an all-in-one WordPress SEO plugin with various features. It comes with a comprehensive set of 100+ features to optimize your website’s SEO easily and efficiently.

Among all, Rank Math’s 404 Monitor and Redirections are two very important tools, not only for the site’s technical SEO but also for user experience and trust. Let’s talk about them.

Rank Math’s 404 Monitor Module

Its 404 Monitor tool lets you identify broken links on your website and fix them efficiently. The features you’ll get are:

• Basic and advanced 404 monitor settings for free and pro users, respectively.
• Stores logs of instances where your visitors had landed on missing pages.
• Export 404 errors to store them and access them in the future.
• Clear the unwanted logs that are resolved.

Rank Math’s Redirections Module

On the other hand, the Redirections tool allows easy redirection of those broken or missing URLs to working and relevant pages. Some of its features include:

• You can organize and filter to manage the redirections effectively.
• Take bulk actions on redirections to quickly manage redirects.
• Backup, import, or export your redirects when necessary.
• Debugging or viewing the statistics is possible.

How Do 404 Monitor and Redirections Help Recover the Lost Traffic?

The 404 Monitor and Redirections tools aim to improve user experience, recover lost traffic, and maintain SEO performance. How? Let’s know why.

• Your visitors can leave your site if they land on 404 pages. So, redirection is needed to keep them engaged.
• To ensure the backlinks linked to old pages aren’t wasted, redirecting the broken URLs becomes essential.
• Fewer 404 errors mean search engines can perform effective indexing and maintain website health.
• Users also trust and explore more content if the site has smooth navigation.
• Overall, redirection helps regain traffic that would have been lost due to outdated or broken links.

In a nutshell, 404 errors can drive visitors away and lead to lost traffic over time. Tracking these errors and redirecting them guides users back to useful content. 

How to Make Rank Math Ready to Use?

Before using the desired Rank Math modules, ensure it’s active on your site. Moreover, there are certain pre-configurations to do too. Have a quick look!

The free version of Rank Math provides the general options for 404 Monitor and Redirections. To export error logs or get access to other advanced capabilities, you need to purchase a premium plan.

Check out the detailed guide on the process of installing a WordPress plugin.

Once you’ve got your free or premium Rank Math plugin on your site, connect your Rank Math account. When doing this, you must select the ‘Advanced’ mode. 

In addition, you can enable the 404 Monitor and Redirections modules. 

Here’s our complete guide on Rank Math to configure the plugin.

However, you may already have been using this plugin before and are planning to use these modules later. In that case, log into your WordPress dashboard and just go to ‘Rank Math SEO > Dashboard’ and pick the ‘Advanced Mode’ at the top right.

This quickly switches your basic mode to the advanced mode. Once the advanced mode is enabled, then only you’ll get the 404 Monitor and Redirections modules.

With that, we’ll move to our main concern!

How to Use Rank Math’s 404 Monitor Tool?

Now, let’s get down to business and check how to use Rank Math’s 404 Monitor tool. Ensure you’ve installed and activated the ‘Advanced’ mode of Rank Math.

If that’s a yes, then let’s get going!

1. Enable the 404 Monitor Module

First, you must enable the Rank Math’s 404 Monitor module. To do this, navigate to the ‘Rank Math SEO > Dashboard’ menu.

There, enable the ‘404 Monitor’ module as shown in the screenshot below. 

2. Configure the 404 Monitor Settings

Next, click the ‘Settings’ button present in the module to get access to the 404 Monitor configuration options. 

With that, let’s go through the provided options one-by-one. First, you’ll find two modes. They are ‘Simple’ and ‘Advanced’.

• Simple: This mode logs a few details about the 404 errors, i.e., URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), hits, and access time.
• Advanced: If you want more details, like the Referer URL, than what the Simple mode offers, then enable the Advanced mode.

We’ll know about this information and how to use it to fix 404 errors later.

After the ‘Mode’ option, there’s a log limit in which you can set the maximum number of rows to keep in a log. If you don’t want any limit, then set it to 0.

Following that, you can exclude paths to perform 404 monitoring. This can be URIs or keywords that you don’t want in the logs. Pick one of the options among Exact, Contains, Starts With, End With, and Regex, then enter the keywords.

Plus, you can turn on the ‘Ignore Query Parameters’ option if you want to ignore the part after a question mark in a URL while the 404 Monitor tool logs errors.

Lastly, click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

The image below inputs the exclude path via the ‘Contains’ option.

3. Use the Information and Fix Errors

Once you configure the settings, go to ‘Rank Math SEO > 404 Monitor.’ There, you’ll find the information that you can use and fix the 404 errors. 

i. Simple

When enabling the ‘Simple’ mode, this is the information to use, and how you can fix the 404 errors. Here we go!

• URI: URI refers to that URL that a visitor tried to access on your site. This helps in identifying if there’s a typo in those URLs. If you find any such thing, then easily fix it.
• Hits: Hits means the number of times the incorrect URI was accessed. Ensure you prioritize the URIs with the most hits first while solving them.
• Access Time: This field shows the time of the last hit that occurred on the URL. Give priority to the recent 404 errors with the most hits.

For instance, the URI listed is correct, meaning your own page or post URL is incorrectly active.

This is the simplest example to resolve the issues identified from the Simple mode by correcting the URL. So, this works best for typos. 

Just open the post or page and then navigate to the ‘General’ options of the plugin. There, click ‘Edit Snippet’ and correct the permalink. 

Here, we’ve changed ‘myy-first-post’ to ‘my-first-post.’ Make sure to save the changes by clicking ‘Save.’

ii. Advanced

The ‘Advanced’ mode can capture different errors of one URL too. So, this mode is preferred only to solve the errors that the Basic mode couldn’t.

If you’re using the ‘Advanced’ mode, then this is the information to use besides the Simple mode details. Check how to use them for fixing the errors:

• Referrer: It has the URL that caused a 404 error. So, it determines the error source (internal or external) and lets you contact the site to correct its link.
• User-Agent: Provides browser details of the visitors on which 404 pages appeared. This helps best in finding and solving issues that occur when the usual URLs get converted to affiliate links on a browser.

Similar to the Simple mode, the same can be done to internal links inside your posts or pages identified from the Advanced mode. For example, this works when you’ve entered the wrong URL for an internal link on a post or page.

Let’s say the ‘new-post’ link on the blog is internally linked but using ‘neew-post’.

Just locate the internal URL added and click the ‘Link’ option. Now, correct the URL. That’s it! Make sure to save the changes by clicking ‘Save.’

What about the external links causing the 404 errors? You need to contact the responsible website owner, whose link you used is shown as a 404 error.

Despite these actions, suppose your website still shows the 404 error. Or let’s say the website owner didn’t respond to you. In that situation, the best way to resolve 404 errors is via redirection.

We’ll learn how to perform redirections in the next tutorial section below.

Overall, fixing the 404 errors is possible with these actions:

• Fixing the problem source which can be internal or external.
• Searching, sorting, and filtering the specific errors to resolve.
• Prioritizing the errors with high hits and recent access time.
• Redirecting the URLs that are creating this issue.

For now, let’s suppose the errors are corrected. Then, what? Let’s move forward.

4. Export or Clear the Error Logs

Some 404 errors can likely happen in the future too. So, reviewing and fixing them may be necessary later. For that, having the previous details helps in understanding how the issue occurred and what measures were performed.

Hence, you can export the details to generate reports of the errors in a duration. To do that, click the ‘Export’ button at the top of the page. Now, pick the start and end date. Then, press ‘Export.’

This downloads a CSV file to your system with the 404 errors. Just open the spreadsheet and get insights.

Moving forward, suppose there are some general errors that have already been solved. Or let’s say you’ve completed the export and don’t want to congest all of them on your WordPress dashboard. Then, you may want to delete the logs. 

• In that case, click the ‘Clear Log’ button to delete all logs.
• Press the ‘Delete’ option for each log you want to delete.
• Or select the logs to remove in the checkbox and pick the ‘Delete’ option in the dropdown option and hit ‘Apply.’

The screenshot below shows the different options available for deletion.

In addition, you must ignore some 404 errors related to sales and giveaways, which can be from malicious users. So, delete them too.

That’s all about using the Rank Math’s 404 Monitor module to sustain your site traffic. Now, head towards its crucial Redirections tool for solving this error.

How to Use Rank Math’s Redirections Tool?

As said before, this section explores how to use Rank Math’s Redirections tool.

Once you identify the 404 errors on your website, you may have already tried to resolve them. But some errors require the redirection technique.

So, we’ll go through the process of using the Redirections tool now!

1. Enable the Redirections Module

First, you must enable the Rank Math’s Redirections module. To do so, open your WordPress dashboard and go to ‘Rank Math SEO > Dashboard.’

There, enable the ‘Redirections’ module as shown in the image below. 

2. Configure the Redirections Settings

Next, click the ‘Settings’ button in the module to check out the Redirections configuration options. 

Afterward, let’s go through its options one after another. 

i. Debug Redirections

Initially, you’ll find the ‘Debug Redirections’ option. Enabling it will let you locate and debug redirections. But why is it a crucial setting?

Suppose your website grows, and managing the redirection tasks becomes hectic. During that time, you may create multiple redirections for the same URL. In this case, enabling this feature helps in debugging.

ii. Fallback Behavior

In addition, there’s the ‘Fallback Behavior’ option. Let’s say your visitor enters a URL and you haven’t set up any redirection for it. Or suppose a user tried to access the URL ending with /login, /admin, or /dashboard.

In such situations, WordPress will auto-redirect to the default 404 page, homepage, or a custom redirection page. This depends on your choice.

iii. Redirection Type

Here, you can denote the type of redirections you’re creating. The options are:

iv. Auto Post Redirect

Lastly, you can enable this option if you want the plugin to automatically create a redirect at first. If you need to change it, then do that later by altering the slug of that post, page, or category.

Once you’re done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

3. Add New Custom Redirections

After setting up, move to ‘Rank Math SEO > Redirections.’ Here, you can start adding new redirections.

Let’s say the old ‘example.com/old-post‘ post isn’t working because the URL has been changed to ‘example.com/new-post.’

If simply editing the slug isn’t effective, then add a new redirection by clicking the ‘Add New’ button. Otherwise, pressing the ‘Add New Redirection’ option.

On this form, enter or choose these options:

• Source URLs: The URL (in 404 Monitor) that you want to redirect from. Pick the match type among the given options and add the URL accordingly. Here, we’ll go with the exact URL and enter ‘https://example.com/old-post/’.
• Destination URL: The URL to which you want to take your visitors after redirection. Here, it’s best to add the full URL to reduce confusion. So, we’ll keep ‘https://example.com/new-post/’.
• Redirection Type: Pick between the 301, 302, and 307 redirects. In this example, let’s go with the ‘301 Permanent Move’ option.
• Maintenance Code: Select among 410 and 451 maintenance modes. This isn’t a compulsory option, so we’ll not use it in this example.
• Status: Define whether the redirect is active or not. That’s helpful if you’re creating the redirects beforehand and making them work afterward. Here, we’ll go with ‘Activate.’

• Redirection Category: If you want to organize the categories, then add one. Just enter a name like ‘updated posts’ and click ‘Add New.’
• Scheduled Activation: Schedule the redirection to be usable from a specified date. For example, your visitors can be redirected to an offer page during a festive season that starts as per the schedule.
• Scheduled Deactivation: On the other hand, scheduling the deactivation date is also possible for the redirection to stop working after a duration.

Once you enter all these details, click the ‘Add Redirection’ button.

4. Check and Monitor Redirects

After saving the redirection, you can check and monitor them. If you have many redirections, then you can find the new redirection through its category. Just pick the category from the dropdown and click ‘Filter.’ Makes it easy, doesn’t it?

Following that, check if the redirection is actually working. Just enter the previous source URL in the browser. Hopefully, it redirects to the new destination URL, which accurately opens the URL that the visitors must see.

For example, we entered the ‘example.com/old-post/’ URL, and boom, the ‘example.com/new-post/’ post opens with the site’s contact information.

Moreover, you can monitor the statistical details of the redirections. This involves the number of hits, created date, and last accessed date.

• Hits denote the number of times any visitor has accessed the URL.
• ‘Created’ depicts your redirection creation date.
• ‘Last Accessed’ defines the latest time when a visitor got redirected.

There’s no Advanced mode for redirections, so that’s all the information you’ll get. With these details, you’ll understand that your redirection is working fine.

Congrats on resolving all the 404 errors using the powerful Rank Math plugin!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Feel like we missed anything? Here are some FAQs that solve your confusion.

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap for this tutorial. Hopefully, you understand that Rank Math’s 404 Monitor and Redirections tools are crucial to recover lost traffic.

Therefore, these guides help you sustain your web traffic through 404 error resolution and redirections to relevant pages.

If you have further questions, then post down a comment. We’re ready for help.

Moreover, check out our other guides on how to improve core web vitals and make most out of Content AI.

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