Export Yoast Premium Redirects to the Redirection Plugin
See how easy it is to export redirects from the Yoast SEO premium plugin to the Redirection plugin.
This will keep you from losing all of your redirects should you elect to delete the Yoast SEO premium plugin.
Take a Backup
Before you make any changes, be sure to have a full backup of your site that you can easily restore.
READ: WordPress Backup Checklist for more.
Install and Activate the Redirection plugin
If you already have it active on your site, no worries!
The newly imported redirects will be appended to the database and will not overwrite the redirects you have already created in Redirection.
Do you want to segregate the Yoast redirects?
The Redirection plugin has a feature called Groups so you can keep types of redirects together.
This is a handy filter feature for helping you locate those types, but it is not required.
If you do want to segregate them, you’ll want to create that Group in Redirection first.
Go to Tools > Redirection > Groups
Scroll down to the Add Group section.
Give the group a name – like Yoast Redirects.
Leave the module set to WordPress.
Click the Add button.
Export Yoast Redirects
Go to Yoast Premium > Tools
Look for the Import/Export link either at the bottom or top of your Tools list.
It’s here
or here
Click the Export redirects tab
A new dialogue area will appear to export as a .csv file.
This file type can be opened with Excel, Google Sheets or any other spreadsheet program.
Click the Export redirects button.
Depending on your computer settings, you may see a pop up dialogue box asking where you wish to save the file.
Otherwise, check the default folder where you save downloads.
The file name will be wordpress-seo-redirects.csv
Open the .csv file.
It will look something like this:
Before you can import, you must remove the top field label row!!!
Highlight that top row and delete from the file.
Do not leave a blank row!! Be sure to delete the row and it’s data.
Then do a Save As on the file with a new name.
If you see a dialogue box saying some of the features will be lost or such, go ahead and save anyway.
This new file is the one you want to import to the Redirection plugin.
To Import to Redirection
Go to Tools > Redirection
If you are already using the Redirections plugin, these new redirects will be appended to the ones you already have.
Click the Import/Export link
Click the Add File button in the Import section.
Select the file from your computer or drag it into that spot.
Be sure to check the Import to group setting!!!
Click the Upload button.
You can’t leave this screen until the import finishes!
Click OK when the import is done.
If you see an error, it may be something like the one below, I’m checking into this one, and will update this post. Please report any error you see.
If you created a Group, be aware that the default display shows all redirects in all groups.
Return to either your Redirects list or Groups, depending on where you imported them, to see the list.
You can now delete the Yoast SEO Premium plugin and your redirects will not be lost.
Tidying Up
The Yoast SEO Premium plugin auto creates redirects that you may not want to keep. These might be for posts where you changed the title or slug prior to publishing.
You can go through the new redirects in the Redirection plugin and delete any that you don’t want to keep.
Need Help?
Feel like you can do this, but you’d feel even better with a qualified tech looking over your shoulder?
Contact me for a private live session where we can screen share while chatting on the phone. It will take us all of about 15-20 minutes. That’s cheap stress relief!!
A great tutorial MaAnna. And you also gave directions for those of us not used to creating csv files. That is huge for me. Just a note. Before I exported from Yoast I created a cleanup list of those redirects I knew for sure I would be deleting later. Then I started the process. When I audited the list after import I deleted those first. That gave me a bit more confidence on how deletion would look before I tackled the rest. Thank you for the tutorial.
I appreciate your help with initially creating the tutorial, Marilyn!!
We sure don’t want to loose the redirects we meant to make!
MaAnna,
Thanks for the tutorial but I have a question.
I want to import my redirects from Yoast to the Redirection plugin, but will be keeping the premium plugin. Do I need to delete the redirects in Yoast then? If so how would I do that?
Thanks
Check to see if there is a way to shut off that function in Yoast first. I would hold off doing the move until you know it will not create any new ones.