How to Resend Your WordPress Website to Yesterday

When you make a significant change to a website (e.g., adding a new page, modifying the content of an existing page, or making significant structural changes to the site’s layout), you should never lose visitors—or customers—to another website. Having a web presence is already a significant investment, and it’s a common sense measure to make sure that your website is as good as new.

You can resend your website to yesterday with a few clicks. This article will walk you through the steps to do just that.

Find The URLS

The first step is to find the un- 301 redirected URLs (Uniform Resource Locations) for the various pages of your WordPress site. These are the links that people may have clicked on that were directed to a specific page of your site but have since been redirected to an unknown destination. For example, if you changed the name of a page on your site, that page’s link would become a 301 redirect to the new name. To find these URLs, you can use a free tool like Google Search Console. Simply type in your site’s URL, followed by the word “google”. For example, if your site’s URL is https://www.domain.com, you would type “https://www.domain.com google” into the Google Search Console to find all of the pages that are currently being redirected.

Once you have a list of the URLS you need to work with, you can move onto the next step.

Redirect Each URL To The Home Page

You should redirect each URL to the home page of your site. The homepage is usually the most visited page of a website, and it makes sense to direct all of the traffic to one place. Additionally, if you want to keep the original link structure of your site (e.g., if you decided to keep all of the URLS but removed all of the redirected content), directing each URL to the home page is one way of keeping that structure.

To redirect a URL to the home page of your site, you can use an XML Sitemaps application like Yoast’s SEO Ultimate. All you need to do is install this plugin and fill in the details of your site. You can either choose to redirect all of the pages in your site to the home page, or you can choose specific pages to redirect (using the drop-down menus at the top of the plugin’s dashboard interface).

Once you have the home page set as the default redirect for your URLs, you can move onto the next step.

Remove All Redirects From Old Comments

If you notice, when you post a comment on your site’s blog, the URL for that comment will be automatically generated and inserted into the comment itself. Many websites use this feature to provide a link back to the original blog post or content piece that the comment is referring to. This technique helps to ensure that your site’s readers can easily find their way back to the source of an article or content piece whenever they want to visit those pages again.

You can use a tool like Find Redirect to search for all instances of these 301 redirects in your WordPress site’s database. Once you have this tool, you can use its search bar to find all of the places where these URLs are present in your content.

Find Redirect is a simple and free tool, so you have nothing to lose by trying it out. Additionally, you can use its “Export to Html” feature to create a list of all of the URLs that it finds. This is especially useful if you want to make sure that you don’t miss any instances of these redirects. You can then download this list and manage it in your favourite text editor. For example, if you use Sublime Text, you can select the xml file generated by Find Redirect in your downloads folder to view the redirection in HTML format. Doing this allows you to easily identify and correct any errors that the tool may have found.

Get Rid Of All The Extra Characters

When you purchase a premium account with a theme or plugin provider, you will typically find that the company provides you with a few starter themes and a few starter plugins. These are completely functional, but they may contain some extra characters that the developer didn’t intend to include. Additionally, the templates and plugins that come with a premium account usually do not support additional languages, which can also cause issues for multilingual websites.

You can remove all of these characters with a plugin called Unicode Encoding Removal. When installing this plugin, you will need to set it up so that it only modifies existing characters. This means that all of the letters in your content will retain their original forms. Once you have this set up, you can click on the plugin’s icon in your plugins section to activate it.

The plugin will display a window with the names of all of the characters that it finds in your site’s content. You can remove these characters one by one, or you can click on the “Convert to Plain Text” button to have the plugin attempt to remove all of them at once. Keep in mind that some of your site’s content may contain special characters that the plugin cannot remove. If you are unsure whether or not a character will cause issues, you can always choose to leave it alone and click on the “X” to remove it from the list. You should remove all of the characters that are not words or numbers—this will make it much easier for your website’s readers to find what they are looking for. As you remove more and more characters, you will begin to see an improvement in your SEO scores, as long as you are using SEO tools like Google Search Console.

Check Your Sitemaps

If you use a sitemap generator like Google’s XML Sitemaps, you will need to check its settings in order to make sure that they match the structure of your website. You should use the generator’s “Preview” option to view the sitemap that it creates in your preferred browser (usually Google Chrome). You can then use the “Save” option to save the sitemap as a.xml file that you can directly upload to your website’s root directory (e.g., http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).

Ensure that the settings of the generator are correct, and then you can move on to the next step.

Reduce The Amount Of Attached CSS And JavaScript

When your website’s design and functionality is enhanced with images, CSS, and JavaScript, it can weigh your site down with additional bytes that you don’t need. The more components that you have, the longer it will take for your web pages to load. This is why it is a good idea to remove as much of these components as possible. If you use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve your website’s content, you can ask them to remove the CSS and JavaScript that is not necessary for displaying your content. A good CDN should be able to provide you with a list of all of the resources that are not required to display your content. You can then choose to exclude these resources from being downloaded by your website’s visitors.

Remove Unnecessary External Links

Just like the URL of your site, the URLs of other websites will become redirects to your site—if they are still present—once you make changes to your site’s content. You don’t need to maintain these links, as they are not helping you to achieve your goals, so you can remove them. You should remove all of the links that point to other sites that you don’t need. If you notice, many link shortening services like Bitly will identify and then remove these links from your website’s HTML. Bitly’s service is free, so you have nothing to lose by giving it a try.

Update Your Theme And Plugins

The last step is to update your theme and plugins. If you use WordPress, then it is almost certain that your site is powered by the popular CMS (Content Management System). There are hundreds of themes and plugins that you can install on your site, and it is a good idea to update your current theme and plugins regularly to ensure that they remain up to date and functional. Even if you use a stable, premium theme or plugin that was released a while ago, it is still a good idea to update it regularly to ensure that it stays that way.