Redirects Are the Easy Part. Cleaning Up After Them Is Where Everyone Else Stops.

Click Scan Entire Site and Linkilo walks every published post in every public post type, looking for internal anchor tags whose href matches any URL you’ve redirected. It checks 10 URL variations per redirect (trailing slashes, full URLs, decoded forms) so nothing slips through. Results are sorted by impact — most-polluted redirect first — with expandable per-redirect drill-downs showing the affected post titles, post types, edit links, and the surrounding sentence with the link text highlighted. Then you click Fix Now or bulk-fix several at once.

The Choose Action modal gives you three side-by-side options for every fix. Replace Links updates the href from the old URL to the new destination, keeping the link and its anchor text intact — this is what most people want most of the time. Unlink (Keep Text) removes the anchor tag but keeps the inner text, so the words remain part of your sentence without being a link. Delete Completely strips the entire anchor and its text from the post. The modal shows literal HTML before-and-after examples for each so you can see exactly what will change.

Every bulk link update writes a complete copy of each affected post’s post_content as a per-post backup before changing anything. The batch is recorded with a timestamp and a description like “replaced 47 links in 12 posts”. The Undo History button on the Site Scanner tab opens a modal listing the last 10 batches — click Undo on any batch within 24 hours and every affected post is restored to its exact pre-change HTML. After the 24-hour window, backups are auto-cleaned to avoid database bloat.

301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary), and 307 (Temporary Strict) are the three options in the type picker. Use 301 when content has moved forever — search engines pass SEO value to the new URL. Use 302 for short-lived moves (seasonal pages, A/B tests) where you want the original URL to stay indexed. Use 307 when the request method must be preserved (the strict form is needed for redirects of POST requests, for example).

No. Redirects fire on the parse_request hook at priority 1 — one of the earliest practical hooks in WordPress — before WordPress wastes cycles on a 404 lookup. The lookup uses an indexed database query (key on old_url) so it stays under a millisecond even with thousands of redirects. Cache-busting headers ensure browser and CDN caches don’t trap users on stale rules. Plus, fixing your stale internal links eliminates redirect chains that were slowing pages down before.

An optional setting that improves how auto-redirected posts behave. With Smart Blog Routing on, when you delete a blog post, Linkilo redirects it to its first category page instead of just the homepage. So a deleted “Best Coffee Grinders” post in the Coffee Gear category would 301 to /category/coffee-gear/. Visitors and search engines land somewhere relevant instead of dumped at the front door. With the setting off, deleted posts go to whatever your Default Redirect Target is (homepage, custom URL, or just allowed to 404).

Yes. Export your redirects from any plugin as CSV and import via the three-step wizard in the Tools tab. The format is simple: old_url, new_url, type, pass_query. Comment lines starting with # and a header row are auto-detected and skipped. Two checkboxes give you safety nets: Skip duplicates (recommended) avoids overwriting existing rules, and Dry run (preview without importing) shows you exactly what would happen before you commit. Per-line errors are surfaced (e.g. “Line 7: Empty old_url”) so you know what to fix.

Use a wildcard like /category/* → /topics/* and the captured segment carries through to the destination — /category/coffee/ becomes /topics/coffee/. For more complex patterns, tick “Use regex pattern” and use full PCRE syntax with $1, $2 backreferences in the destination. Cross-domain destinations work too — https://old-domain.com/page/ → https://new-domain.com/page/ is a valid redirect for site migrations.

Each redirect logs the referrer, a timestamp, and a one-way hashed IP (md5 of the IP combined with your WordPress salt). The raw IP is never stored. The Click Analytics modal per redirect shows a traffic-source split (direct, internal, external) computed from referrers, plus the last 50 click timestamps. Aggregate counts and last-clicked times sit on each redirect row in the dashboard. Click data older than 90 days is auto-purged daily by a background cron job — consistent with data-minimisation expectations.

Rank Math and Yoast Premium handle basic redirect creation and 404 monitoring well, but neither scans your post content for stale internal links pointing to redirected URLs — so the redirect chains and link-equity dilution issues stay unfixed. Linkilo’s Site Scanner, three-way Choose Action modal, and per-batch undo are unique to us. They also don’t do redirect chain detection, traffic-source click analytics, or Smart Blog Routing. Many users keep Yoast or Rank Math active for on-page SEO and use Linkilo as the redirect-and-link-cleanup layer on top.

That’s a good sign — it means none of your existing redirects are creating internal-link chains right now. Run the scanner periodically (or any time after creating a batch of redirects from a migration) to keep things clean. The scanner is also worth running after enabling Auto-Redirect, since previously-deleted posts may have left stale links you didn’t realise existed.

Pure WordPress. Linkilo never writes to .htaccess and never asks for server-level access. Redirects are served via the parse_request hook at priority 1, then a template_redirect fallback. This means it works on every WordPress host — shared, managed, VPS, dedicated — and it works with Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed without any server config. It also means your redirects are version-controlled in your WordPress database, not scattered across server config files.

A small utility in the Tools tab. Paste any URL and it sends a HEAD request to probe the actual server response — status code, redirect chain (if any), and the final Location header. Useful before going live with a complex redirect chain, or for spot-checking that a competitor’s site is doing what you think it’s doing.

Yes. The Redirection Manager — including the Site Scanner, three-way action choice, 24-hour undo, click analytics, 404 monitor, CSV import, and chain detection — is included in every Linkilo plan at no extra cost. You also get the AI link suggestions, broken link checker, topic clusters, crawl log analyzer, and everything else in the platform. One plugin, one bill.