About this plugin
PathCatch is the URL-health layer for WordPress. It is not an SEO suite — it keeps
your links, redirects, and crawl paths clean, and rolls everything into a single
URL Health Score so you can see at a glance what needs fixing.
Redirects
- Create and manage 301, 302, 307, and 308 redirects with exact, wildcard, and
regex matching.
- Configurable matching: trailing-slash and case normalization, query-string
handling, and rule precedence.
- Auto-create a 301 when a published post’s slug changes, so old URLs never 404.
- “Redirect intelligence” flags redirect chains and loops, and — as a background
check — redirects whose destination now returns a 404 or a server error, with
one-click “flatten chain”.
- Import from CSV and.htaccess; export to CSV, Apache, or Nginx (as text you
install yourself — PathCatch never writes to your server config).
404 monitoring
- Log WordPress-routed 404s with hit counts, referrers, and bot filtering.
- Turn any logged 404 into a redirect in one click.
- Retention control keeps the log from growing without bound.
Broken-link & sitemap scanning
- Scan posts and pages for broken links and images, on demand or on a schedule,
with an optional email digest.
- Detect and validate your existing sitemap (WordPress core, Yoast, Rank Math,
AIOSEO) for unreachable or error URLs — PathCatch complements those plugins and
does not generate a competing sitemap.
Built to be safe
- Safe by default and reversible: nothing changes your content or server config
without you choosing to.
- Hardened: redirect targets are validated against open-redirect abuse, outbound
link checks are guarded against SSRF, and all admin actions are capability- and
nonce-protected.
External services
PathCatch’s link and sitemap scanners make outbound HTTP requests from your
server to check whether URLs found in your content and sitemap are reachable.
For internal links these hit your own site; for external links they contact the
third-party sites you link to (just like a visitor’s browser would). No data about
your site is sent to any PathCatch-operated service — the plugin has no external
service of its own and does not “phone home”.