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Why Are Your Redirection Logs Missing, Slow, or Inaccurate? Common Issues and Fixes

20 threads Sep 16, 2025 Plugin → Redirection

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If you're using the Redirection plugin for WordPress, you rely on its logs to monitor 404 errors and track the performance of your redirects. However, users often encounter issues where logs are missing, slow down the admin area, or contain inaccurate data. Based on common community reports, this guide explains why these problems occur and how to resolve them.

1. Logs Are Missing or Being Cleared Unexpectedly

If your redirect or 404 logs are disappearing sooner than your configured expiry time, a few things could be happening.

  • Conflicting Redirect: In some cases, a specific redirect rule can prevent 404s from being logged entirely. If your 404 log suddenly stops collecting data, review your redirects for any complex regular expressions (RegEx) and try disabling them to test.
  • Cron Job: The plugin uses a WordPress cron job (redirection_log_delete) to clean up old logs based on your retention settings. If logs are purging daily despite being set for a month, another process on your site might be interfering with this cron event or forcibly clearing the log tables.
  • Database Error: Very long or malformed URLs can sometimes cause a "Failed to insert log entry" database error, preventing them from being logged. Check your server's error logs for this message.

2. The WordPress Admin Is Very Slow

A significant slowdown in your WordPress admin, especially when managing posts or WooCommerce orders, is frequently tied to log settings.

  • Log Volume: Setting log retention to "A month" or longer on a high-traffic site can generate massive database tables. Querying these tables slows down admin areas that display data. To fix this, go to Redirection → Options → Logging and set both "Redirect Logs" and "404 Logs" to "No logs" or a shorter period like "A day."
  • Table Corruption: In extreme cases, very large log tables can contribute to database corruption or crashes, necessitating a restore from backup. Keeping log retention minimal is the best prevention.

3. Logs Are Inaccurate or Hits Are Not Recorded

When logs don't seem to reflect actual traffic, caching is often the culprit.

  • Page Caching: If a page is served from a cache (like a plugin, server, or CDN cache), the request never reaches WordPress and therefore cannot be logged by the Redirection plugin. This is the most common reason for missing hit counts. There is no way to log cached requests through the plugin.
  • IP Address Logging: If you're using a service like Cloudflare, the default REMOTE_ADDR IP logging setting will only capture Cloudflare's IPs. To log the real visitor IPs, change the setting to HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP in the plugin's options.
  • Unexpected Hits: If you see hits from your own IP address that you didn't generate, it could be another plugin, a security scanner, or a server process checking your site's URLs.

4. How to Manage and Clear Your Logs

If your logs are causing problems, you can manage them manually.

  • To clear logs, navigate to the "Log" or "404s" tab. Click the checkbox in the table header to "Select all" items. Then, use the Bulk Actions dropdown, select Delete, and click the Apply button. Note: The "Clear all" button only deselects items; it does not delete them.
  • To reduce log size, set log retention to a shorter period or disable logging entirely in the plugin's options.

By understanding these common issues, you can better configure the Redirection plugin to maintain site performance while gathering the data you need.

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