Since this is a personal blog, WordPress’s default author archive doesn’t make sense. /author/forthright48 just shows posts I wrote, which is everything. Instead of this redundant archive, it would make more sense to redirect Author page to About page.

Setting up the redirection was simple thanks to the Redirections plugin. Or, if you have an SEO plugin (e.g. Yoast or Rank Math), check if they provide similar support. They all have similar UI.

Once activated, simply add your source and target URL and it will set a 301 redirection.

Be careful when setting up 301 Redirect

The plugin creates 301 redirects by default. 301 Redirection is for links that have “Moved Permanently“. Browsers tend to cache such redirects to reduce page loading time. So if you create a 301 redirect and the user visits that link once, then changing that redirection won’t affect the cache user’s browser until the user deletes their cached data!

I have been initially redirecting my author page to my home page. When I added the redirection to my About page, I noticed it only worked in Incognito mode on Chrome. My normal browser had cached the old redirect.

So it’s best practice to always create a 307 – Temporary Redirect first and change to 301 only when you are 100% sure. Otherwise, you could get stuck with bad redirection on a subset of your users. Click on the ⚙ icon to see advanced fields on the plugin and change the redirect.

Are there other use cases for redirecting URLs?

There are many. For example, I noticed that a post of mine had a spelling mistake in its URL. That’s embarrassing. So I updated it and added a 301 redirect from the old to the new URL.

Read the following article from Backlinko: Redirects 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Setup & Best Practices. It covers the basics and more.