A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested. Why would you add a redirect? For example your ranking in google is a very important thing if you rely on being discovered organically, so if you have started a new website in Fabrik and have an old site it's important to us that you don't loose that ranking. Another reason might be you have links from external sites and you don't want those to go to a dead end(404). To keep your ranking and not send people to 404's you need to add in some redirects.
In Fabrik all redirects are 301's, meaning it's a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.
Let's take and example from Tim's old site, his about page had the URL
In Fabrik he's decided to call that page biography, and his URL now looks like this
Once you point your domain to Fabrik, anyone trying to get to the old URL will be sent to a 404, if we add in a redirect we are going to tell Fabrik to not show a 404 but redirect to the new version of that page. Give it a try http://timjarvis.com/about/
To add your own into Fabrik head over to the Settings > Redirects section.
Here you'll need to add in your old and new paths, we aren't going to worry about the whole URL just the paths so it can work on multiple domains. A path is simply anything after the domain.
Let's take Tim's example again, his old path would look like this:
/about/
and new
/pages/biography
as you can now see in Fabrik.
Internal Redirects
Fabrik portfolio sites are designed to follow a sensible, linear order to help your viewers discover all of your work.
However, there may be some exceptions where you want to change the way your viewers interact with your website, for example sending them straight to a project or about page instead of to your homepage, or perhaps from your homepage directly to a portfolio.
Take a look at our Internal Redirects guide for some examples, and more importantly, for the syntax, on how to redirect within the content of your site.