Redirection plugin: wordpress vs apache module?

[Justin1]

Hi,

Any one familiar with the wordpress plugin 'redirection'

Are there any SEO benefits of having the plugin write the 301 redirects into the .htaccess?

The standard mode does not use .htaccess but has wordpress genertae the 301s

Thanks

[Justin1]

Thanks William, nice to hear advice from some one who has been using the plugin.

I'll go ahead and use the apache module to keep the server usage low.

[Justin1]

Thank for the advice Paul, I'll go ahead and write into the .htaccess as your recommend.

[williampatton]

Everything Paul says is true and with regards to the SEO perspective faster is better. Speed is a ranking factor which Google looks at.

I've actually used "Redirection" on a few of my sites before and the speed difference between redirects using WordPress redirect VS Apache redirect is marginal but the resource usage difference is vast. It requires very little server resources to read the .htaccess file and redirect compared to running through the core of WordPress to generate the 301 then send it.

Point the plugin to the .htaccess file and use the Apache module instead and you'll get both the benefit of slightly improved redirect times with the added benefit of using less server resources to do it.

[wickedsunny1]

Like paul mentioned, htaccess redirects are faster compared to a wordpress plugin.

but if you a huge number of redirection required on pages/posts then go for the plugin.

[ThompsonPaul]

The big benefit to having the redirects written into htaccess is that htaccess will run them much more quickly (and with lower server overhead) than from inside WordPress. If you only have a few redirects at a time to correct for moved pages or creating short URLs for marketing campaigns, doing it within the Redirection plugin is fine.

But if you're writing a large number of redirects (to handle a site move for example) you're far better off writing them into htaccess.

Paul