: Fastest way to redirect dead URLs to home page A client of mine scrapped his entire wordpress site of many years for a custom CMS. The URL structures both use the /<post_title> format,

@Gloria169

Have you thought about adding a string to the new URL's and then do a regex in Apache config to 301 redirect all URL's that don't match the string? You should certainly do 301 redirects to retain the value of the backlinks.

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@Radia820

You can add "ErrorDocument 404 /404.php" to the .htaccess file and setup a php redirect on 404.php.

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@Ann8826881

In your custom 404 page you could check the structure of the URL and 301-redirect if it looks good - or preferably look it up against a known list of previous Wordpress URLs.

At least this way you are only doing the lookup/redirect if the page doesn't exist.

If you are doing 1000s of redirects with Apache, it will be more efficient/faster to do this in your server config (vhost) files.
Ref: Move .htaccess content into vhost, for performance

EDIT: I expect you've considered this already, but the thought was beginning to nag... do these missing pages have equivalent new URLs? Although a lot more work, it will obviously be many(*N) times better (for SEO and users) to redirect to the new URL if possible.

(Where N is a sufficiently large arbitrary number.)

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