Redirect Doctor

Description

You have been redirecting URLs for years. Every rename, every restructure, every fixed typo
added one more rule. Nobody ever went back to check whether they still make sense together.

Redirect Doctor reads the redirects you already have and tells you what is wrong with them.

It does not create redirects behind your back and it does not replace your redirection plugin.
It audits what is there, on nine screens:

• Chained redirects — /a/ sends to /b/, which sends to /c/. Every visitor and every
  search engine pays for the extra hops. Cascades of eight steps are common on old sites.
• Loops — /a/ sends to /b/, and /b/ sends back to /a/. The browser gives up and the
  page never opens. This is the only fault that truly breaks something for a visitor.
• Conflicts — the same address with two different destinations. Only one can win, and it is
  not always the one you meant.
• Duplicates — the same rule written several times over the years.
• 404 errors, grouped — not a raw log, but pages people actually keep asking for, sorted by
  how often they are hit, with a suggested destination for each.
• Redirects safe to delete — rules that have not sent a single visitor in years.
• Redirects sent to the home page — rules that do not send the visitor to a replacement
  page, but to your home page. This is not a redirect, it is a soft 404: you are telling
  Google that a dead address now holds your home page, and your home page slowly takes on the
  reputation of every dead address pointed at it.
• Doubtful destinations — redirects whose starting address and destination share no word
  at all. Often a batch of rules pointed at something that has nothing to do with them. The
  screen ranks them; you decide, and you can mark a pair as intended so it stops being
  reported.
• Links to fix in your content — posts and pages that still link to an address which now
  redirects. Fixing the link removes the hop at the source.

Everything is measured against your own site. No external service is contacted, no data leaves
your server, and nothing is written unless you tick a box and click a button.

Requires the Redirection plugin

Redirect Doctor reads the tables of the Redirection plugin by John Godley. It is built on
top of it, the way an extension is built on top of WooCommerce. Without Redirection installed
and active, Redirect Doctor has nothing to read and WordPress will not let you activate it.

What the free version does

The free version is a complete diagnosis. All nine screens, the real totals, the filters,
the search, the CSV export, the copy-to-clipboard button — and the printable health check.

That health check sums up everything found on your site in numbers, with the risk each one
represents, and names no address. You can hand it to a client or a manager as it is.

Each table shows its first five rows, and tells you how many more there are. The counters on
the tiles are never rounded, never capped and never faked: if your site has 1,609 unresolved
404s, it says 1,609.

Two things belong to the Pro version:

1. Fixing. Every action button is visible but switched off. Nothing is deleted, created or
   rewritten by the free version — ever.
2. The addresses that form your loops. The free version tells you how many loops you have
   and how many redirects they involve. Finding a loop buried in fifteen years of accumulated
   rules is the hard part; undoing it takes three clicks.

What the Pro version adds

• Every row of every table, not the first five.
• The loop map: which addresses point at each other.
• One-click fixing, with an undo. Shorten a chain so each step goes straight to the final
  destination. Delete dead rules. Create redirects for your most-hit 404s. Break a loop by
  removing a link.
• Rewriting the links inside your content that still point at an old address, as relative
  addresses so they survive a domain change.
• An action log of everything that was changed, with its own export.
• A health check that also shows where you started and where you are now.

Nothing is ever changed without a ticked box, and every batch stays recoverable afterwards.

Pro is available from orion-sigma.com.

Technical details