Posted by Aimee Cozza on July 9th, 2018

Sometimes, you just get really comfortable with some of the plugins you use. It’s really easy to take for granted the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of free plugins for you to use in the WordPress repository, and even easier to forget that no one is getting paid to write these. Many of the times plugin authors rely on donations, but ultimately write plugins from the good of their hearts. And to those people, who make our lives easier, we thank you.

The big problem with this is that no one is paying these plugin authors, so if an author gets bored or doesn’t want to support their plugin anymore, they can just sort of… abandon it. We get used to using the same plugins because they’re a. good, b. we know how to use them, and c. they just work. Simple 301 Redirects was one of those plugins.

An Ode to Simple 301 Redirects

You always did what you said you would – redirected.

Your wildcard redirects were easy to use. Just place an asterisk!

You even had other plugin authors writing import scripts for you, making it even easier.

No one could ever call you a memory hog.

You were a simple, non-problematic plugin.

You didn’t even have an icon.

But now… You are dead.

We will miss you. Also, we’re kind of annoyed that we can’t simply export from you, but whatever, we’ll live.

Need a different plugin?

Try Redirection. Not only does it work, but it also keeps track of 404 errors for you so you can simply add them to your redirection repository with the click of a button. Alternatively, redirects are built into Yoast SEO‘s premium version if you don’t want to keep track of another plugin.