Pantry Redirects compared with Redirection, Rank Math and Yoast SEO

Pantry Redirects sends a visitor from one path on a site to another, and keeps a log of the paths that return a 404 so there is something to point the next redirect at.

Most sites get this job done by whichever big plugin they already have installed for something else, or by a dedicated redirect manager that does far more than redirects. Either way, the site ends up with settings it never opens, a database table or two it never asked for, and sometimes a paid tier standing between it and a feature this basic.

This article compares Pantry Redirects with the plugins most sites reach for first. The comparison is not a case for Pantry Redirects every time. Some of the plugins below do things Pantry Redirects deliberately does not, and for some readers that is the right trade.

The plugins most people install

Redirection is the plugin most people mean when they say "a redirect plugin". It has 2+ million active installations on wordpress.org and describes itself as "the most popular redirect manager for WordPress". It is free with no paid tier at all; the developer states plainly that there is no premium version to sell. Beyond a redirect list it tracks 404s, offers conditional redirects by referrer, browser, cookie and IP address, keeps a full log with geographic and user-agent detail, and supports Apache, Nginx and WP-CLI. Its business model is simply free.

Rank Math SEO reaches 4+ million active installations, mostly for its title, schema, sitemap and content-analysis tools. Bundled into the free plugin is a Redirection Manager and a 404 Monitor, so a large number of sites get redirect handling as a side effect of installing an SEO suite. Rank Math's own pricing page markets an "Advanced Redirection Manager" and "Advanced 404 Monitor" as part of its paid PRO plan, priced from €7.99 a month billed annually, alongside sixteen-plus schema types, internal linking and a role manager already in the free tier. Its business model is free with paid PRO, Business and Agency plans.

Yoast SEO is the largest of the group, at 10+ million active installations, built around the same per-post title and description fields that Pantry SEO covers, plus schema and technical SEO settings. Its redirect manager is not in the free plugin at all. It is sold as part of Yoast SEO Premium, at £118.80 a year excluding VAT for one site, described on Yoast's own page as a tool where "move or delete a page and Yoast prompts you to set up the redirect", with bulk management by CSV. Premium also bundles AI-generated titles, a content planner and three further extensions. Its business model is a free plugin with a paid annual Premium subscription that includes the redirect feature.

301 Redirects – Redirect Manager, built by WebFactory Ltd, is a dedicated redirect plugin with 300,000+ active installations. The free version covers redirect creation, a 404 log with a dashboard widget, redirect statistics and CSV import and export. Its own wordpress.org listing promotes a PRO upgrade for wildcard and regular-expression matching, automatic typo fixing, a fuller log, a link scanner and a centralised dashboard across sites, and it cross-promotes the same developer's other free plugins from inside its description. Its business model is free with an optional paid PRO tier.

Where the big plugins cost you

Redirection asks nothing for money, but its logging is broader than most site owners intend to keep. Its own FAQ says plainly that log entries carry "IP, user agent, and referrer" for every hit, which it recommends using "as well as your own personal knowledge of the site" to work out what a request was. That is a data-retention decision the plugin makes at install, on a plugin that many people add purely to fix a handful of broken links.

Rank Math does not require an account to redirect a URL, but its own FAQ concedes that a free Rank Math account is needed to use its API for keyword suggestions and site analysis, and its listed external service discloses that connecting one sends the site's URL, username and API key to Rank Math's servers. That step sits in the same setup wizard as the schema, sitemap and analysis settings a reader installing Rank Math only for redirects will never touch.

Yoast puts the redirect manager behind a locked, paid tier rather than in the free plugin at all. Once bought, it lives inside a plugin with its own General, Search appearance, Social, Tools and Integrations screens, and its own indexables system, a database structure Yoast describes as "unifying all SEO data for faster queries" across every post on the site. That is a considerable amount of settings and storage to add for a redirect list.

301 Redirects keeps its core free, but its in-plugin messaging does the selling for it. A regex or wildcard request in its own FAQ gets the answer "you should look into WP 301 Redirects PRO for these advanced features," and its description recommends the same developer's Captcha and Force SSL plugins from inside the redirect screen. The settings screen a reader opens to add one redirect also carries an upgrade pitch and two adjacent product pitches.

Across all four, a job that is one settings page and a list table on its own arrives bundled with an SEO suite's worth of screens, a paid tier, or visitor data the site owner never asked to store.

What Pantry Redirects does instead

Pantry Redirects does one job: exact-path redirects and the 404 log that tells you what still needs one. The redirect list holds a source path, a target, a type of 301, 302 or 307, an enabled switch and a hit count. Matching ignores a trailing slash and letter case, and can ignore query strings, so /Old-Page/ and /old-page are treated as the same address. Saving a redirect is refused if the source is empty or the home page, the target is neither a path nor an http or https address, the source is already redirected, the redirect points at itself, or it would send a visitor around a loop of up to ten hops. The 404 log keeps the last 200 unique paths with a hit count and the time each was last seen, and nothing else: no IP address, no user agent, no referrer. A logged 404 becomes a redirect with one click, from the same row. The list and the log both import and export as CSV.

Measured on the release zip: 34 KB, 2,913 lines of PHP, two options (pantry_redirects_settings and a housekeeping version number), two custom tables for the rules and the log, no post meta, no custom post types, no cron events, no transients. Its admin CSS and JS load only on Plugin Pantry > Redirects. It makes no front-end requests and no external requests of any kind. There is one dismissible notice on first activation and never another. Nothing in the free plugin is a trial: the does-not list is published on the plugin's own page rather than discovered by hitting a locked button.

Two choices behind it are worth explaining. The 404 log stores a path, a count and a timestamp and nothing that identifies a visitor, narrower by design than Redirection's IP-and-referrer logging: a log built to show what to redirect next does not need to know who asked. And the plugin uses wp_redirect() rather than wp_safe_redirect(), because sending a visitor to another domain is a normal thing to want, and WordPress's own URL-safety check would resolve the target through DNS and refuse a private address, breaking a redirect to a staging host and counting as the external request the Standard forbids; the target is instead checked structurally at save time by a user who already holds manage_options.

The plugin also runs over the Pantry Standard's own 1,500-line guideline, at 2,913 lines, and its README carries the reason the Standard requires above 2,000: two WP_List_Table subclasses for the redirect list and the 404 log, since a native WordPress list needs its own columns, sorting and row actions; the admin write paths, including a 70-line map of plain-language outcomes for every save, import and delete; and a database layer that writes ascending and descending queries out separately because the coding standard will not allow a sort direction to be concatenated into a prepared statement. The README states the trade-off directly: cutting the 404 log would bring the plugin back under 1,900 lines, at the cost of half of what it exists to do.

What it does not do, and who should stay with the big plugin

Pantry Redirects has no regular-expression or wildcard matching. A site restructuring an entire folder of URLs at once, or redirecting a whole pattern of old addresses to a new structure, needs pattern matching this plugin will never have. Redirection does this for free today; 301 Redirects PRO and Rank Math's Advanced Redirection Manager do it for a site already paying for one of those products.

It does not create a redirect automatically when a slug or permalink changes. A site that renames pages often and wants that handled without a second step should use Redirection, which does this by default, or Yoast SEO Premium, which prompts for a redirect at the moment a page is moved or deleted.

It stores no visitor data at all, not even in the 404 log. That is a deliberate limit, not a gap to be filled later, but a reader trying to work out where a wave of 404 traffic is coming from, by referrer or by country, needs the fuller logging Redirection keeps.

It makes no external requests, so it has no scheduled email digest and no dashboard showing redirects across several sites at once. A reader managing many client sites should look at 301 Redirects PRO's cross-site dashboard instead. A scheduled log clean-up and email digests are on the roadmap for a Pantry Pro add-on, but that add-on is not released yet and should not be relied on today.

A reader already paying for Yoast SEO Premium, or already running Rank Math's free tier, already has a redirect manager; adding Pantry Redirects on top would only mean two places to create one. And a reader who prefers redirects stored as ordinary WordPress data rather than a plugin-specific table is served by Safe Redirect Manager, a free plugin with 40,000+ active installations that stores each redirect as a custom post type and includes regular-expression matching at no cost.

Moving over

Someone switching from Redirection, the largest dedicated competitor, can carry across any redirect that is a plain path to a plain path. Redirection's source and target fields map directly onto Pantry Redirects' source path and target, and the type carries across unchanged. Anything built on Redirection's regular expressions, or on its referrer, browser, cookie or IP conditions, has no field to land in and needs to be rebuilt as a plain path or left running in Redirection.

Redirection's own export can be reshaped into the four columns Pantry Redirects reads: source, target, type and enabled. A header row is optional and is recognised automatically when the first cell reads source. A blank type column uses the site's own default type from Settings, and the enabled column accepts 1, yes, true, on or enabled for on, with anything else off and a missing column on. Rows that fail the plugin's own validation, such as a duplicate source or a self-redirect, are skipped and counted in the import notice, and the file is capped at one megabyte and 5,000 rows.

Hit counts and 404 history do not carry over. Redirection's counts stay in Redirection; Pantry Redirects starts counting from the moment each redirect is saved, and since it never stores IP addresses, user agents or referrers, there is no visitor history to bring across even if the format allowed it. Matching options, such as whether query strings are ignored and how many 404 paths to keep, are not imported and need to be set again on the Settings tab. Run both plugins briefly in parallel while checking that exact-path matching catches everything a Redirection regex rule used to, since there is no fallback for a pattern without a plain-path equivalent.

The short version

Pantry Redirects suits a site that wants a plain redirect list and a 404 log, and nothing else attached to get there: no SEO suite, no visitor logging, no paid tier standing between the site and the feature. It is the wrong choice for a site that needs pattern-based rules, automatic redirects when a permalink changes, or a shared view across many client sites; those jobs belong to Redirection, to Rank Math or Yoast SEO Premium if the SEO suite is already in use, or to 301 Redirects PRO for the multi-site dashboard specifically.

Measure	Pantry Redirects
Zip size	34 KB
Lines of PHP	2,913
Options	2
Custom tables	2
Front-end assets	None
External requests	None
Tracking	None
Locked features	None