How Does The Hide WP Login Redirect Work?

When you hide your WP Login and Admin pages, Shield will use a "404 Not Found" error page when a visitor tries to access your old login URL, or admin area.

This error page looks like this:

This is useful for indicating to the visitor that this is not a WordPress site and they've tried to access a URL that simply doesn't exist.

However, if you would like to provide a more friendly response, you can choose to redirect the visitor to a particular page, or a custom 404 page of your choosing. To achieve this, you'd use the 'redirect' option within Shield.

How does WP Login & Admin Redirect option work?

Let's look at some examples.

  1. Let's say that you'd like to redirect your visitors to your homepage. You would simply use a forward slash: "/"
  2. If you want to redirect to a "friendly" 404 page, you could use: /404
  3. How about redirecting to your blog? You could use: /blog  (or whatever the path is to your website's blog).

To redirect to your website home page, you just put slash "/".

(see the screenshot below)

This option is located under the Shield main navigation menu > Security Zones. When you click gear icon next to Login zone to edit settings for this entire Zone, a configuration sidebar window will open up for you. Then, select the Hide Login tab > WP Login & Admin Redirect option.

 Access to WP Login & Admin Redirect option with example redirection

Important Notes

  • If you leave the redirection path option empty, then the default "404 Not Found" page will be displayed.
  • The redirection option does not support redirecting to other websites. Please always use relative paths from your website's homepage. This is also good if you want to use the import/export feature to set the same redirection behaviour across all your WordPress sites with Shield. If you were to us full URLs with "https://" then this wouldn't work if you exported it to other sites.