Manage Your Redirects

We’ve all experienced it. We’ve planned a road trip, and part way through, we encounter the dreaded and unexpected construction zone. The road ahead is closed. But don’t worry, there’s a detour route to help you still get to where you’re going!

Redirects on the internet are kind of like that. Except instead of taking longer to get to your destination, it takes the same amount of time to get to your intended web page. Because it’s the internet, and everything is pretty much instantaneous 😄

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

What Is A Redirect?

A redirect is a protocol established to take someone to their desired destination when they attempt to go to a web page using an old URL.

It’s like when a business moves location. You still want to go to the same business, but it’s moved addresses.

When building a website, it’s very possible that you might create a new version of a page to replace a previous version. In doing so, your new page will have a new slug/permalink. This is like a web page moving addresses.

For example, let’s say you had an established page called Sign Ups, and the URL for that page is https://realitybible.church/sign-ups.

And you wanted to replace it with a new page called Registrations, and the URL for that page is https://realitybible.church/registrations.

You could set up a redirect where, if someone tried to go to your old page using https://realitybible.church/sign-ups, it would forward them to your new page for sign ups at https://realitybible.church/registrations and they could carry on without needing to contact your church to find where your Sign Ups page has moved to. (Or worse, giving up and not signing up at all 😰)

Creating a redirect in this way is a great way to ensure people end up where they want to go, rather than ending up on a dreaded 404 page 😱 (Click here to learn more about status pages and their meanings.)

This is especially helpful (and important!) to do if you update the slug to a page that you’ve advertised on social media or other marketing materials. Instead of needing to find all the instances where the old URL exists, you can simply set up a redirect and carry on without worry 😊

What's great is that if you simply update the slug/permalink on any page, Nucleus gives you the option to automatically generate a redirect from the old slug/permanlink to the new one! Let's take a look at how this works 👇

2 Types Of Redirects

There are 2 types of redirects you can create: 301 (Permanent) and 302 (Temporary).

While pretty self-explanatory, 301 redirects signify a permanent redirect from an old URL to a new URL, whereas 302 redirects signify a more temporary redirect from an old URL to a new URL.

In most cases, any redirect you create will be a 301 redirect. Unless you’re creating a temporary promotion and you want people to go to a different page than the typical one for a defined period of time that will eventually end, you’ll likely want to create a permanent redirect.

Note: You can always delete a permanent redirect, even though it's called permanent.

For instance, perhaps you have a Small Groups page at https://realitybible.church/small-groups and you are running a contest to help promote people to join a small group.


So instead of updating the Small Groups page, you could create a new page called Contest at https://realitybible.church/contest that outlines the contest details as well as has all the same places to sign up for small groups.

You could then set up a 302 (temporary) redirect that forwards people going to https://realitybible.church/small-groups to go to https://realitybible.church/contest instead.

Eventually that contest will end, and then you can delete the redirect, and people can go back to viewing the normal Small Groups page and not be redirected elsewhere.

Automatic Redirects In Nucleus

When you initially create a page and give it a name, Nucleus will take that name and create a slug/permalink that matches it. For instance, if you create a page called I’m New, Nucleus will create a URL slug /im-new. (So you would be able to access that specific page at https://yourcustomdomain.com/im-new)

You can, of course, always update the slug to be something different. Perhaps you updated the name of the page to Visitors and you now want the slug to reflect that change. You can then update the slug to be /visitors so you will now be able to access that page at https://yourcustomdomain.com/visitors.

When updating the slug of a page on your Nucleus website, Nucleus will automatically create a permanent redirect from the previous slug to the new one. This helps to ensure that there are no broken links on your website, and so that if anyone tries to access the old URL, they will be redirected to the correct/new URL.

You can, of course, toggle that option off so that Nucleus doesn’t automatically create a redirect. But in doing so, you run the risk of people not being able to find the page they’re looking for, and then they’ll end up on a 404 page instead. (Click here to learn more about status pages.)

Add New Redirects

When the automatic redirects aren’t enough, you can always manually add redirects in your Nucleus Dashboard.

This can be helpful if you’re coming from an old website builder to Nucleus Web. For instance, let’s say you previously had a page on your old site titled Tithes & Offerings and the corresponding slug was /tithes-offerings, so that the full URL was https://realitybible.church/tithes-offerings.

On your new website built using Nucleus Web, instead of creating a online donations page titled Tithes & Offerings, you create a page called Give, with the corresponding slug being /give, so that the full URL is https://realitybible.church/give.

Since the Tithes & Offerings slug never existed in Nucleus Web, Nucleus would have no knowledge of that page existing, and therefore cannot create an automatic redirect to your Give page.

Thankfully, you can create a manual permanent redirect in just seconds to accommodate for this 😎

To create a new redirect, go click on Manage in your Nucleus Web Dashboard and select Domain & Redirects. Then click on Redirects. Click here for a quick link.

Then click the + Add New button.

Choose 301 (Permanent) in the top field.

Then paste the slug from your old page in the Redirect From field.

Next, paste the new slug for the page you created in Nucleus Web in the Redirect To field.

Lastly, click Add Now.

Now whenever someone tries to go to https://realitybible.church/tithes-offerings Nucleus will redirect them to https://realitybible.church/give

Another example of using redirects is when wanting to make it simpler for people to access an action in The Launcher from outside your church’s website.

If you’re utilizing the PrayerFlow, GivingFlow, or any custom Flow in The Launcher, you can easily share a URL with people to quickly go directly to a particular action.

For instance, if you want to share the PrayerFlow, you can copy the email, social, another website trigger link.

Then, back to managing your Redirects in Nucleus Web, you can create a new permanent redirect using the following information:

Redirect From: pray

Redirect To: YOUR PRAYERFLOW TRIGGER LINK

This would look like the following 👇

After clicking Add Now, you can then share a much shorter URL with people (in emails or on social media) that takes them to your website and opens The Launcher directly to your PrayerFlow.

This would look like https://realitybible.church/pray. Much easier than sharing [insert PrayerFlow trigger link] 😅

Manage Your Redirects

When you have several redirects created, you can manage them easily in your Redirects Panel.

To start, go click on Manage in your Nucleus Web Dashboard and select Domain & Redirects. Then click on Redirects. Click here for a quick link.

You can use the search bar to type in the letters or words used in the redirects.

You can also use the Filters to only showcase redirects that Nucleus has automatically created (System) or that an admin has manually created (Admin), along with showing only 301 or 302 redirects.

If you need more filtering, you can always use the Date Filter to search for a specific date range of when a redirect was first created.

Clicking on the down arrow of a redirect lets you delete it. But be warned, there is no undo, so if you accidentally delete a redirect, you will need to recreate it.

Simply click Delete and then Yes.

What Next?

Throughout this article, we’ve been using realitybible.church as an example domain for a church’s website. You can manage your redirects without having yet connected your own custom domain to your Nucleus website. But if you’re ready to connect your domain, we have an entire guide walking you through that process:

If you were previously using Nucleus 1 for your website and also utilized Nucleus 1 Sermons, it’ll be important that you follow our guide on how to connect your Sermons to your Nucleus 2 website. (This is simply an interim measure until the new version of Sermons is introduced in Nucleus 2.)

And if you’re utilizing any of our other products and you haven’t checked out our rollout guide, it’s definitely worth your time to check that out.

Otherwise, if you haven’t explored any other products Nucleus offers, now is the perfect time to do so! If nothing else, at least check out The Launcher and Nucleus Prayer. After all, they’re free 😎

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