Since we have introduced the recipes system, earlier this year, we have received a lot of comments, feedback and ideas of new recipes our customers would like to see.

We have added a few recipes during the last few weeks and will continue to add more in the future. For now, we have added the following recipes:

Block AI bots: This recipe allows you to block AI bots from accessing your website. More precisely, it instructs crawlers used to train AI models to not crawl your website (using the robots.txt mechanism) and, if you enable all the options of the recipe, it prevents those bots from accessing your website altogether.

Discover and install this recipe

Redirect a Fully Qualified Domain: This recipe allows you to redirect a fully qualified domain to your root domain. Using this recipe, requests performed to example.com. (note the trailing dot) will be redirected to example.com

Discover and install this recipe

Serve a Web App Manifest: This recipe allows you to serve a Web App Manifest file from your website. The Web App Manifest is a JSON file that provides information about your web application and is used by browsers to install your web application to the home screen of a device.

Discover and install this recipe

Web App Manifest Content-Type: This recipe is the little sister of the previous one. It allows you to set the Content-Type header of any existing Web App Manifest file of your website to application/manifest+json.

Discover and install this recipe

We still have many functional recipe ideas to add to our catalog to help you protect and enhance your website. If you have any recipe ideas you'd like to see added, please let us know by contacting us directly.

👉 Discover all the redirection.io recipes

New improvements have been made to the security settings for organization administrators, providing greater control over how members can access your organization. Org admins now have the ability to restrict and fine-tune which authentication methods are allowed, enhancing both security and compliance.

What’s New?

• More Control Over Authentication Methods: While two-factor authentication (2FA) could previously be enforced for email/password logins since several years, admins can now restrict access by disabling specific authentication methods like Google or Microsoft auth—or even disabling external providers entirely.
• Flexible Security Policies: For organizations with strict security policies, you can now easily tailor which authentication methods are authorized. For example, you can require members to sign in only through enterprise SSO, or block certain options like email/password authentication.
• Improved Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Management: You can still enforce 2FA across all users.

These changes are designed to provide more granular control over access to your organization's data and ensure compliance with your security policies. You can find these settings under the "Security" tab in your Organization Settings.

Check out the updated documentation about security settings for more details on how to manage these new security features.

We have launched today a brand-new navigation menu in the redirection.io manager! Starting today, you’ll notice a more compact, streamlined design that gives you quicker access to more features than ever before.

What’s New?

• Direct Access to Key Features: Access your favorite tools like the "Log View" directly from the menu for improved efficiency.
• Live Crawl Status: A discrete indicator will now show up in the menu when a crawl is in progress, so you’ll always be in the know.
• Collapsible Menu: Need more space for your main content? The menu can now be collapsed, freeing up valuable screen real estate for a cleaner, more focused experience.

While this change might seem subtle, it’s packed with power. Features like Notifications, Segmentation, Marker Templates, and Log Views, which may have been overlooked before, are now more accessible and visible than ever.

Explore the new layout and discover tools you didn’t even know you had!

We are excited to announce a new addition to the redirection.io platform: Traffic Anomaly Alerts! This powerful feature enables you to receive notifications when unexpected changes in traffic patterns are detected on your website, giving you real-time insights into potential issues such as sudden traffic spikes or drops, or unusual traffic patterns from specific countries or IPs.

This feature, available for "Pro" plan users, adds to our robust notification system, which already allows you to track essential events such as DNS changes, instance status updates, SSL certificate renewals, and more. Now, with Traffic Anomaly Alerts, you can further enhance your website's monitoring and response strategy.

Why Traffic Anomaly Alerts Matter

The traffic anomaly alerts are designed to help you stay on top of your website's performance by providing instant notifications when unusual activity is detected. Key benefits include:

• Early Issue Detection: Be alerted to sudden increases in HTTP errors (4xx, 5xx), dips in website traffic, or suspicious spikes from specific countries or IP addresses.
• Customizable Thresholds: Tailor the alerts to your specific needs, ensuring that you are notified only when meaningful traffic deviations occur, and preventing unnecessary notifications.
• Faster Response Times: By knowing instantly when traffic anomalies occur, you can act quickly to resolve issues and minimize potential damage to your website's performance or user experience.

How to Set Up Traffic Anomaly Alerts

Configuring a traffic anomaly alert in redirection.io is simple and flexible. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Select the Notification Type: Choose the "Traffic anomaly" notification option to start setting up your custom alert.

2. Define the Monitoring Criteria: In this step, you’ll select a Log View to monitor (e.g., all 4xx errors, or traffic from a specific IP address, the traffic under a specific path). Then, set up the threshold for triggering alerts. You can preview when the notification would have been triggered based on recent data, allowing you to fine-tune your settings.

   Examples of potential configurations:

   • Notify when more than 10% of all traffic consists of 4xx errors within a 10-minute window.
   • Alert when the total number of requests drops below a certain threshold within the last 5 minutes.
   • Trigger an alert when traffic from a particular IP or country exceeds a specified volume.

3. Select Notification Channels: Choose how and where you want to be notified — email, Slack, or webhook.

4. Enable the Notification: Finally, activate the alert. You can pause or mute it later if needed, ensuring you're only notified when it's truly necessary.

Fine-Tuning Your Alerts

We recommend experimenting with the thresholds to make sure they fit your website’s typical traffic patterns. In step 2, the preview functionality allows you to simulate how the alert would behave based on historical data. This ensures that you set conditions that are sensitive enough to catch real anomalies without triggering false alarms.

The ability to customize alerts to your website’s needs provides a proactive monitoring solution, helping you mitigate issues before they escalate into bigger problems, and ensuring that your team remains informed in real time.

Get Started Today!

Traffic Anomaly Alerts are now live for all users on the "Pro" plan. Set them up in your project to start benefiting from better control, insight, and rapid response capabilities when traffic issues arise on your website. With this feature, redirection.io continues to provide you with the tools you need to manage website performance efficiently.

If you have any questions or need assistance setting up your alerts, don’t hesitate to consult our documentation or contact support!

We’re excited to announce a groundbreaking new feature within redirection.io: the ability to test all your redirection rules at once, with just a single click! This enhancement ensures that your redirect plan works exactly as expected, even when managing complex rulesets with tens of thousands of redirections. Whether you're launching a site migration, updating content, or refining your user experience, this tool offers unparalleled convenience, accuracy, and confidence.

Key Benefits at a Glance

• Instant Validation: Ensure that all redirection rules work as intended without manual checking.
• Scalability: Perfect for large-scale projects with extensive rule sets.
• Proactive Error Detection: Identify potential conflicts or rule overrides before they affect your users.
• Chains and Loops Dectection: Do not ship in production a redirections plan that contains redirect chains or, worse, loops.

Understanding the Power of Rule Testing in redirection.io

One of redirection.io's standout features is the ability to attach example requests to each rule you create. These examples allow you to test how each rule behaves in real-world scenarios before it goes live. During the rule creation process, the "Impact" step becomes crucial: redirection.io evaluates how the new rule interacts with all other rules in your set. This way, you can see how requests will be processed, whether they should trigger the rule, and what specific actions will be executed (e.g., a 301 redirect).

Example: Analyzing the Impact of a Rule

For example, say you're creating a rule to redirect https://example.com/shop/about to /buy/about. After setting up the rule and adding sample requests, the "Impact" table will show you whether the rule is triggered correctly and if any other existing rules are affected.

Here’s what you’ll see:

This feature doesn’t just check if the new rule works; it also warns you about any potential rule conflicts, including cases where actions might be overridden by higher-priority rules. If there’s an error, like a redirection loop, redirection.io alerts you to correct it before going live.

👉 Read our documentation about the possible example matching statuses

How redirection.io Helps with Specific Request Testing

In addition to evaluating individual rules, redirection.io allows you to test specific requests against your entire ruleset. The “Test the Rules” feature lets you input a URL, add extra conditions like HTTP method or request headers, and see a detailed breakdown of which rules get triggered.

Here’s how it works:

1. Navigate to the "Test the Rules" page.
2. Enter the URL you want to analyze.
3. Optionally, add advanced parameters like HTTP method or source IP address.
4. Hit “Test this Request” to see which rules are activated and the actions they produce.

This feature is invaluable when you're troubleshooting unexpected redirects or verifying that your rules handle specific requests correctly.

One-Click Testing for All Rules

For Pro Plan customers, redirection.io takes rule testing a step further with the "Test All Rules" feature. This feature is designed to validate every rule in your set, saving you time and effort, especially when working with large or complex rulesets.

Imagine you’ve set up thousands of rules and have just added a new one. You can now instantly check if this new rule will disrupt any previously established rules. With "Test All Rules," redirection.io will show you potential conflicts and errors, along with suggestions for resolving them.

Here’s an example of what you’ll see when an issue is detected:

If your newly created rule affects any previously set rules, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of the problem. Once identified, you can resolve the conflict before deploying changes, guaranteeing that your entire redirection strategy remains intact.

Deploy with Confidence

Managing a large set of redirects has never been easier. With redirection.io’s suite of tools—including rule impact analysis, specific request testing, and one-click testing of your entire ruleset—you can deploy redirects confidently, knowing that everything will work as planned.

By leveraging these advanced testing capabilities, you avoid common issues such as broken redirects, rule overrides, and complex redirection loops. Whether you're working with a few rules or managing thousands, redirection.io ensures that you stay in control of your redirection strategy.

Start using this powerful feature today and elevate the way you manage redirects!

Last year, we have launched the redirection.io managed instances, a great way to use redirection.io without having to install and maintain the redirection.io agent on your servers. With the managed instances, it takes a few clicks to get started with redirection.io, and you can start monitoring and fixing your website's redirections in no time.

In certain setups, however, the backend service used to serve your website does not correctly handle the traffic coming from reverse proxies, and considers that a large amount of requests arriving from a specific range of IP addresses is suspicious. Automated security systems are perfectly right to be cautious, but in this case, it can lead to false positives, and the managed instances might be blocked by the backend service if it is not correctly configured to accept traffic from our managed instances.

This was the case with Vercel, a very popular platform to deploy websites and serverless functions. While perfectly working most of the time, we have recently begun to receive reports from users that a part of their traffic was being refused by their Vercel backend. After some investigation, we found that Vercel's security systems were blocking some of our managed instances IP addresses, and on some Vercel websites only. Sharing this information with Vercel, we have been able to confirm that the issue was due to the way Vercel's security systems were configured, and that it was possible to whitelist the managed instances IP addresses - except for Vercel Enterprise plan subscribers.

To make it easier and more reliable for our users to use redirection.io with Vercel, we have developed a Vercel middleware that packages the Web Assembly version of the agent, that we already distribute as an open source project. This middleware is a small piece of code that you can add to your Vercel project, and that will automatically handle the incoming requests and apply the rules configured in your redirection.io project.

Deploying the redirection.io Vercel middleware requires developer access to your Vercel project and can be done in a few steps:

1. Install the redirection.io Vercel middleware in your Vercel application;

   $ npm install @redirection.io/vercel-middleware
   
   // or with yarn
   $ yarn add @redirection.io/vercel-middleware
   

2. Configure the redirection.io Vercel middleware with your redirection.io project's key as a Vercel environment variable named REDIRECTIONIO_TOKEN;
3. Enable the middleware in your Vercel application

   // src/middleware.ts
   import redirectionioMiddleware from '@redirection.io/vercel-middleware';
   
   export default redirectionioMiddleware;
   
   export const config = {
       unstable_allowDynamic: [
           '/node_modules/@redirection.io/**',
       ],
   }
   

4. Deploy your Vercel application.

That's it! Your Vercel application is now using the redirection.io Vercel middleware, and you can start monitoring and fixing your website's redirections in no time.

👉 Read our complete documentation about the redirection.io Vercel Middleware.

The redirection.io Vercel middelware package is available as an open-source package on our GitHub page.

As of today, the redirection.io apache and nginx modules are available for Ubuntu Noble 24.04 LTS, released last month. In the meantime, we are deprecating the automatic builds for Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 LTS.

The redirection.io modules are now available as compiled versions in our packages repository for the following Ubuntu versions:

• Ubuntu Focal 20.04 LTS
• Ubuntu Jammy 22.04 LTS
• Ubuntu Noble 24.04 LTS

This means that these packages will work out of the box with the nginx version provided on these versions of Ubuntu, without the need to compile them manually. If you are using another version of Ubuntu, or a custom Apache or Nginx build, you can still compile the modules from the source code available on our GitHub repository.

• How to compile the redirection.io Apache module
• How to compile the redirection.io nginx module

TL;DR;: We are introducing redirection.io recipes, a collection of 1-click install rulesets created to ensure you get the most out of using redirection.io.

We're thrilled to announce a game-changing addition to our platform that's set to revolutionize the way you manage your website's traffic. Say hello to redirection.io recipes – your ultimate traffic rule companion!

redirection.io has always been more than just a redirection tool. Our platform offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to give you unparalleled control over your site's traffic and performance. From analyzing traffic patterns to creating complex rules for redirects, meta tags management, response headers, and beyond, redirection.io has been your go-to solution for optimizing website performance.

But we understand that with great power comes great complexity. While many of our users have been successfully utilizing our platform to its fullest potential, we've also noticed that some of you may feel a bit overwhelmed when it comes to creating complex rules. That's why we've been hard at work behind the scenes to develop a solution that simplifies the process without compromising functionality.

Enter redirection.io recipes – the answer to your traffic rule woes!

Think of recipes as your personal collection of use-cases and practical solutions tailored specifically for redirection.io. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, recipes are here to guide you through even the most intricate traffic management scenarios.

So, what exactly can you expect from redirection.io recipes?

1. Simplified Rule Creation: Say goodbye to confusion and hello to clarity with our new assisted mode for creating complex rules. With recipes by your side, you'll be able to navigate the rule creation process with confidence, no matter your skillset.
2. Extensive Use Cases: From basic redirections to advanced meta tags and response headers management, redirection.io recipes cover a wide range of scenarios to suit your needs. Need to implement folder redirections? We've got you covered. Want to enhance your site's security with custom headers? Consider it done.
3. User-Friendly Interface: We've designed recipes to seamlessly integrate into the redirection.io platform, ensuring that you can access them whenever you need them.
4. Constantly Evolving: The best part? We're just getting started. While our initial batch of recipes covers a variety of common use cases, we're committed to expanding our library to include even more solutions based on your feedback. Have an idea for a Recipe you'd like to see? We want to hear from you!

Recipes can also act as a source of inspiration for your own rules. You can use the "Add a long cache duration for the website images" recipe to learn how to cache your images more efficiently, and then apply the same principles to other types of content on your site. By exploring the recipes library, you'll gain valuable insights into how redirection.io can help you optimize your website's performance, security, and overall user experience.

What can redirection.io recipes do?

Many of the scenarios covered with redirection.io recipes should be correctly implemented in most professional websites, just like how the popularization of https a few years ago slightly improved the quality and security of the Web.

The recipes library has launched with a quite large collection of features, that cover different topics:

• Web Performance: Improve loading times and the overall user experience with recipes like "Add a long cache duration for website images" or "Prefetch proxies traffic advice".
• SEO Mastery: Elevate your website's search engine ranking with recipes like "Change the meta title" and "Google Search Console property". These recipes provide invaluable insights and tools to boost your site's visibility and attract more organic traffic.
• Security: Safeguard your website against potential threats with recipes like "Permissions Policy", "HSTS - HTTP Strict Transport Security", and "Referrer Policy". By implementing these security measures, you can protect sensitive data and establish trust with your audience.
• User Experience: Provide seamless navigation and reduce bounce rates with recipes like "Customize Your Error Pages" and "Setup a .well-known/change-password URL". By optimizing user experience, you can keep visitors engaged and encourage repeat visits.
• Flexibility and Control: Tailor your website's functionality to suit your specific needs with recipes like "Redirect except a path" and "Request a password for a folder". With these customizable solutions, you have the flexibility to implement unique features and restrictions as desired.

Some recipes provide a high level of detail that you can learn and draw inspiration from. The Referrer Policy recipe, explains in detail how to improve the privacy of your customers. The Permissions Policy recipe is a complete assistant for adding the support for Permission Policy on your website and slightly enhancing trust between users and your website:

Your first steps with redirection.io recipes

Ready to give redirection.io recipes a try? Head over to our website or log in to your redirection.io account now to explore our growing library of recipes and start optimizing your website's performance like never before.

We can't wait to see how you'll use this feature to take your website management to the next level. And remember, this is just the beginning – with redirection.io recipes, the possibilities are endless!

👉 Discover all the redirection.io recipes

We're announcing the general availability of redirection.io managed instances – a solution designed to simplify website traffic management. With the managed redirection.io offering, setting up your website is as simple as adding a DNS record to your domain. In just a matter of minutes and regardless of technical expertise, anyone can get started.

Since its initial launch in early 2023, we have gathered customer feedback and made significant improvements to the managed redirection.io solution. Our team has worked tirelessly to enhance functionality, reliability, and performance, ensuring that managed instances deliver a seamless and robust experience for every user. Managed instances are deployed in 4 clusters in datacenters globally distributed, with dedicated nodes for each project.

With about one thousand domains already using our managed instances model, we're delighted to be extending this solution to even more users around the world.

Learn how to install your domain with managed redirection.io

What can you expect from redirection.io Managed Instances?

First and foremost, managed instances offer a fast and robust way to gain insights into your website's traffic and performance. Whether you're a small business owner or a seasoned webmaster, our intuitive interface and comprehensive analytics provide you with the tools you need to make informed decisions and optimize your online presence.

Additionally, managed instances are always kept up to date and secure. We handle all updates, monitoring, and security measures on your behalf, giving you peace of mind and time to focus on other aspects of your website. And with SSL certificate management included as part of the package, you can rest assured that your website is protected and secure at all times.

Ready to simplify your website traffic management? Try redirection.io managed instances today and experience the difference for yourself.

👉 Learn more about managed redirection.io or read the docs!

When it comes to collecting HTTP traffic logs, redirection.io is one of the best solutions on the market: once installed, you get all the HTTP traffic logs of your website in real time, and you can use them to analyze user behavior, monitor website performance, and debug issues.

Collecting logs has been one of redirection.io's core features since the beginning and we've been working hard to make it as efficient and reliable as possible. To achieve this, we have been using a lot of different technologies and experimenting with a lot of solutions. As a result, we have recently taken some steps towards making our logs feature the most efficient and reliable it can be and we thought it would be interesting to share the improvements with our community.

Introducing Log View Counters

Two years ago, we added the concept of "Logs views", which was an innovative way to save individual logs screen configurations as bookmarks, so that users could easily access their preffered view at all times. This feature became very popular, and many of our users utilize it to monitor specific parts of their website, or only a range of HTTP status codes, user agents, etc.

Since then, we've been thinking of interesting ways to go further and to add some kind of "counters" to the logs views allowing users to see the number of logs in each view more easily.

Today, we are enabling, for all our users, the new "Log View Counters" feature, which is a way to "pin" several clickable log view counters at the top of the logs screen, so that you can see the number of logs that match the log view. This is a very simple feature, but it is very useful, and we hope that it will help you to better understand your HTTP traffic logs.

Logs timeline navigation

Also, it is a shame that our logs GUI did not easily allow you to navigate in the logs history - this is now fixed and we have added "back" and "forward" buttons to the logs screen, so that you can easily navigate in the timeline.

New filters and aggregations

Some new filters and aggregations are available in the logs explorer, so that you can better understand your HTTP traffic logs. Of course, all these filters can be used in combination with log views, so you can prepare specific traffic views that match your business and your website structure.

For example, we have added the ability to filter logs by "Path" (see only the requests for which the path starts with /blog), "Referrer Host" (which domains to the visitors come from?) or "Query params" (did the URL of the request contain a query parameter?).

Customers using our fully managed instances or the redirection.io agent in reverse proxy mode can also display and filter requests by their "Duration", which is basically the time it took for the backend to process the request. This duration is measured at the redirection.io agent level, from the moment the agent receives the request to the moment it begins to send the response to the client. This is a very useful metric to monitor the performance of your website, and to detect slow pages. This metric can be used to inspect the performance of the redirection.io agent when it comes to performing redirections: most of the time, you should see a 0 ms. duration of such requests, as the agent is able to perform redirections almost instantly.

Faster logs exports

Since day one, we have allowed the export of traffic logs in CSV format. Recently, we've made several changes in our logs storage infrastructure which have resulted in a faster logs export feature. You can now export logs in a matter of seconds, even very large logs sets.

More logs per day

Historically, there has been a limit of 2 million rows per day (even for free projects), in order to avoid performance issues and offer a quality service to all our users. We've even allowed temporary bursts in order to accept traffic peaks. In the current situation, we collect and process every day several billions of HTTP requests.

Since September 2023, we allow to extend the logs retention duration, so our customers can have an insight on their detailed logs for up to 12 weeks. This has been a great step forward for SEO consultants, as this allows them to cover a complete Googlebot exploration window and get clear insights of the traffic fixes priorities: which 404 errors did Googlebot encounter, which pages are the most crawled, where is the crawl budget consumed, etc.

However, we were still missing the ability to upper the amount of logs that can be loaded in a project each day. This was a bit problematic for some of our customers, who have very high traffic websites and who wanted to collect all the logs of their website - the over quota logs were dropped, and this was a bit frustrating as it translated into a flat traffic chart and eventually a loss in the traffic errors collection.

This is now a thing of the past, and "Pro" plan customers can now request higher daily traffic logs limits. We will not detail why collecting an exhaustive view of traffic logs is important from a SEO perspective, as this has already been covered in many other articles, but we are happy to offer this new feature to our customers.

👉 Please contact us if you wish to increase your daily logs quota.

We always love to hear from our customers, and we are always happy to help you to better understand your HTTP traffic logs. Please contact us if you have any questions, if you need some help to extract information from your logs or if you have ideas of features that you would like to see in redirection.io. We are working hard to improve the logs explorer and have many new improvements coming in the next months, so stay tuned!