[ad_1] Managing and scaling a WooCommerce shop is not easy. You need to take care of so many things at once, such as inventory, prices, design, constant updating, and whatnot. In between all of this, it’s possible to miss out on smaller tasks like stock running out or hurting your SEO due to deleting a product. To make sure this does not happen to you, Poly Plugins created a plugin to make WooCommerce redirection easier. In this article, I’ll review the plugin in-depth and will check out its features. Review: Product Redirection for WooCommerce Product Redirection for WooCommerce provides a solution for a specific problem that most big products in the WooCommerce space do not provide. Even if there are products that provide a similar solution, they are often bloated with other unnecessary features and end up slowing down the website. And I am sure we all know how important speed is when it comes to growing WooCommerce stores. So, What Does the Product Redirection Plugin for Woocommerce Do? The purpose of this plugin is to help WooCommerce store owners who are not familiar with SEO by allowing them to easily add redirects to deleted product pages. The plugin allows you to prevent deleting WooCommerce products and assigns required redirection instructions and notices for deleted products. This way, you can redirect the traffic you are getting on a specific page to a different one easily. Why is Redirection Necessary? When a user sees a 404 error, most of the time, they just go back and visit a different link, and this is not at all good for the business. Instead, you can lead the user to a different page and tell them, “The product is no longer available. Consider checking our other products.” Once the product is deleted, it does not tell Google to stop ranking it in search results. If someone looking for “AC DC Tshirt” lands on your product page and sees a 404 notice, they will just go back. This will give a negative signal to Google, and it will affect your rankings. On top of that, the increased bounce rate will become another problem altogether. To prevent this from happening, you need to provide proper (301 and 302) redirects. Features of Product Redirection for WooCommerce While exploring and using the plugin, I came across some useful features which I found worth sharing. Here are some of the notable features: You can show a popup on the deletion of a product in the store backend suggesting to add a redirect or a notice. This would help you keep up with things even if you forgot to add redirects. For every product, you can easily add a redirect, display a notice or add a landing page for products. You can show related products under the notice. If any product goes out of stock, you can show an out-of-stock notice and can showcase related products below the notice. Since the product also handles the SEO aspects of redirection, you don’t have to worry; even if you are getting 50,000 hits per month on a product page, they will be redirected to the page you want. Hands-on with Product Redirection for WooCommerce In this section, I will install and explore the plugin’s features on a local WordPress installation. The plugin has two versions: Free and Pro. The free version is available on the WordPress repository, and with the free version, you get the following features: Article Continues Below Warning notice to not delete products. Custom redirect options: parent category, custom URL. In addition to these features, you get these features in the pro version: Notices on product pages if the product is out of stock. Auto out of stock product management. Custom redirect to landing pages. Recommended products below notices. For this tutorial, we will check out the pro version of the product. Installation and Activation The product installation is simple and straightforward like any other plugin. You can download the plugin once you’ve purchased it. Go to Plugins > Add New. Upload the plugin and click on the Install button. If you do not have Advanced Custom Fields installed, you need to install it as well. However, you might not need to do that in the future, as the devs have plans to remove ACF dependency in the upcoming updates. And of course, this goes without saying; you’ll need a WooCommerce store set up to use this plugin. Backend and User Interface All settings and options are available in a single space in the WooCommerce tab. To access these settings, go to your WooCommerce website’s dashboard. Now click on WooCommerce > Redirection. We’ll be going into a bit of detail here, so sit tight! Here you will see four tabs: General, Out of Stock, License, and Support. General Tab Popup: This triggers a warning popup when you click trash or delete any product. The popup will look like this: Disable Trash/Deletion: When enabled, admins or any other users won’t be able to delete any product. Out of Stock Tab In this tab, you can define what happens when a product goes out of stock. Out of Stock: This check box enables all the options below. Out of Stock Notice: This option lets you set a custom notice when the product goes out of stock. Out of Stock Recommendations: Enabling this option will start showing related products from the parent category. Recommendations Product Count: This option allows you to select the number of products to recommend. Recommendation location: You can select the location for the recommendations. You can select from 9 different locations. License Tab In this tab, you can insert the license for your product. Probably, this is the first tab you’ll visit after installing the plugin. Article Continues Below Support Tab Although it is available as a tab, this option leads you to a new page where you can get support if you face any problems. How to Set Redirects for WooCommerce Products While most options are
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