Detour

Catch every 404 and route lost visitors to a destination that converts.

Detour is a WordPress plugin that intercepts 404 (Not Found) requests and redirects them to a destination of your choice: your homepage, a campaign page, or any URL, instead of letting visitors bounce. Every miss is logged, sortable, and exportable so you can see exactly which broken links are eating your SEO.

Features

• Per-URL rules with three match modes: exact, prefix (with optional {path} substitution), and regular expression
• Five status codes: 301, 302, 307, 308, and 410 Gone for permanently-deleted pages (the SEO-correct answer for content that will never come back)
• Site-wide fallback for any 404 that does not match a rule, with its own configurable status code
• Promote-to-rule one-click button on the 404 URLs log so you can fix a broken URL the moment you see it
• Sortable hit history (by URL, hit count, or last seen) that stays fast past 1M rows
• Per-IP and referrer deduplication so a single bot run does not flood your stats
• Weekly email digests with top broken URLs and trend analysis
• Image fallback: replace missing .gif/.jpg/.png requests with a chosen image
• Admin-bar widget with today / yesterday / month / total redirect counts
• Engineered for high traffic: BINARY(16) hash-keyed lookups, indexed counters, deduplicated indexes, object-cache-backed rule lookups
• No tracking, no telemetry, no upgrade nags, no affiliate links, no backlink injection. GPL all the way down.

Installation

1. Upload the detour folder to wp-content/plugins/
2. Activate Detour in Plugins → Installed Plugins
3. Configure the redirect target under Settings → Detour

On activation Detour creates its log table and runs an idempotent schema migration to add high-performance indexes. Re-activation is safe; the migration short-circuits via an option flag.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.0+
• PHP 7.4+ (tested through PHP 8.3)
• MySQL 5.7+ / MariaDB 10.5+ (uses BINARY(16) generated columns)

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

Attribution

Detour is a fork of All 404 Redirect to Homepage by wp-buy, originally released under GPL-2.0-or-later.

Notable changes from upstream:

• Per-URL rules engine added: a {$prefix}detour_rules table, three match types, five status codes including 410 Gone, object-cache-backed lookups, and a "promote a 404 to a rule" workflow
• Schema overhaul: added a real BINARY(16) URL hash column with a generated index for fixed-width equality lookups, added a count index so admin "sort by hits" no longer triggers a full-table filesort, removed a duplicate prefix index that was wasting writes
• Removed bundled commercial code: canvasjs.min.js was redistributed in the original without a commercial license; replaced with no-chart numeric stats
• Removed promotional surface: upsell banners on the settings page, "More Plugins" plugin-action links, "UPGRADE" admin notices, an empty plugin-row dismiss notice, and outbound backlinks in email digests
• Removed dead code: an unused parallel cron-scheduling implementation, an empty fake-data referrer fallback used for a "demo" mode that never shipped, a never-called option-migration helper, and a raw-SQL data_bind() helper that referenced a $mysql global that does not exist in WordPress
• Throttled .htaccess writes: upstream re-read and conditionally re-wrote .htaccess on every admin pageview; Detour caches that check for 24 hours via a transient
• Quieter logging: removed twelve "operation succeeded" error_log calls so production sites no longer accumulate plugin chatter in their PHP error log
• Renamed and rebranded: display name, menu titles, error messages, and text domain
• Drop-in for existing installs: table name ({$prefix}redirects_404), option keys (p404_redirect_options, options-404-redirect-group, etc.) and stored data are unchanged

Maintained by Centreville Tech LLC.