How to Set Up 301 Redirects in Wix

Fact Checked by: Dr. Marie Haynes

What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect will automatically send a user from one URL destination on your Wix site to a different URL.

301 redirects can be viewed as a change of address for the URL in question. When a redirect is implemented properly between two URLs on your Wix site, there should be no tangible change in your ranking ability or Wix SEO. This is because a 301 redirect alerts search engines of the change and allows 90-99% of the redirected page’s link equity to flow through to the new Wix page. This means that essentially all of the ranking power of the original page will be passed on to the new URL.

What does ‘301’ itself mean? The number ‘301’ refers to the HTTP status code a server will send in response to a client’s request to see your Wix webpage. The entire web uses these Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response status codes and there are many more that make the web work, including 302 and 307, which are more temporary forms of redirects.

Best Practices: When should a 301 redirect be used?

Here are some common examples where you might implement a 301 redirect on your Wix site:

Redirect an old page to a new page (i.e. wixseolovers.com/old → wixseolovers.com/new)

For your Wix website, this will likely be the most common use for a permanent redirect. Say for example, you have a biography page on your site (wixseolovers.com/my-personal-biography), but you would like to make this page display a URL that's cleaner and more intuitive (wixseolovers.com/bio). In Wix, you can easily create a copy of the page with the new URL or simply change the URL slug while implementing a redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Other examples:

Redirect an old domain to a new domain

- Oldwixsite.com → Newwixsite.com

- Oldwixsite.com/about → Newwixsite.com/about

Redirect the entire domain from www. to without-www.

- www.wixseolovers.com → wixseolovers.com

Redirect the entire domain from HTTP to HTTPS

- http://wixseolovers.com → https://wixseolovers.com

Note: Google considers the use of 301 redirects as best practice for migrating your site from HTTP to HTTPS.

Redirect from alternate domains

- Wixlover.com → wixseolovers.com

- Wiixloverseo.com → wixseolovers.com

- wixseolovers.ca → wixseolovers.com

- wixseolovers.net → wixseolovers.com

- wixseolovers.io → wixseolovers.com

If you have a domain that is commonly misspelled or you want to make sure your users are finding your page properly, redirecting from alternate spellings or a different TLD (.ca, .net. co.uk etc) is a great option.

Whatever the reason may be for changing your URL(s), so long as the change is permanent, 301 redirects are the best option from both a user experience and SEO perspective.

From an SEO standpoint, your old domain or page may have links or referrals pointing to it and may already rank well, but without implementing a proper redirect, all of that link equity and the current search rankings may be lost.

From a user standpoint, some people may be used to typing in your domain name manually, have the site bookmarked, or found the site name on an old business card. If that’s the case and no 301 redirect was implemented, these users would likely be shown a 404 error page for the old URL (not good!).

Common Problems with 301 Redirects

Redirect Chains

If there are multiple redirects linked together -- thus creating a “chain” -- search engines may not crawl past the first three redirects. Google’s support documentation explains that Google bot will follow multiple hops in a redirect chain, but beyond three redirects, there is no guarantee it will follow to the end of the chain.

Redirects on Internal Links

Whether you’re making wholesale changes to your URL structure or simply redirecting a few pages here and there, it is recommended you update any relevant internal links to point to the most current 200-status-code URLs without the redirect. It adds another step unnecessarily for crawlers and users if you leave redirects in place on internal links.

Serving the wrong redirect status code

Google is pretty good at eventually sorting out when a temporary redirect was intended to be a permanent one, but be sure to read up on what the status codes in question actually mean and be as consistent and by the book as possible.

Meta Redirects You can technically redirect users via an HTML meta tag that would send a user to a new destination 0 seconds after the initial page is clicked on, but this is rarely if ever a good idea where a proper 301 redirect option is available.

How to Set Up 301 Redirects in Wix

Keep in mind you cannot currently manually edit your .htaccess file (where redirect rules are housed) within Wix, but they have created an easy-to-use SEO tool that handles all of your 301 redirects for you.

Within your wix dashboard, navigate to Settings -> SEO from the main menu.

Scroll down and you will see a 301 redirects section with a quick overview about 301s:

After pressing “Get Started,” you will be presented with the following fields:

By default, Wix will want you to select an existing page on your site from a drop-down menu, and we think this is wise as it helps eliminate any possibility you could paste in the wrong or incomplete URL, drop a letter or a slash, etc. Thankfully, Wix also provides you with the option to add a URL manually:

Hit save once you’ve inputted your old and new URLs and you will see the redirect displayed in a list below:

If you wish to delete a redirect after the fact, simply hover over the active redirect and press the trash can icon:

If you are redirecting at the domain level, Wix links their documentation on how to do this within this section as well:

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Dylan Adamek

Dylan Adamek grew up in Ottawa, Ontario and has always maintained a broad range of interests including playing guitar, physical fitness and investing. He has a passion for any topic involving business and how to help companies of any size succeed. He graduated from the financial management program at George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario and has previously worked for different financial institutions. His past experience has helped him cultivate a love for exploring consumer behaviour through analytics and content creation. He is excited by the prospects that search engine marketing and optimization present for him to help businesses increase their market share and visibility.