Like many hosts, Hostgator provides cPanel to control your website. Included in cPanel is a nice tool to add 301 permanent redirects. These are added to your .htacces file for you – nice. This is handy for many reasons but I commonly need it when converting an HTML site to WordPress.

How long should it take 301 redirects to work on a WordPress website? It should work right away but it will take Google awhile to catch up.

The problem:  Sometimes the 301 permanent redirects works, sometimes they do not.

The solution:  Make the page redirects appear BEFORE the WordPress setup (see featured image above). And be sure ReWrite Engine is turned on.

A simple fix to get your redirects to work on Hostgator and other web hosts.