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.

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 "/":

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.