A Home page redirect can be used when you would like a visitor to navigate to a specific page when they go to your Thinkific URL!
What Does Redirecting Your Home Page Do?
Before jumping into how to do a redirect, let's explain more about how redirects work.
When you have a redirect in place for your Thinkific Home page, anyone who goes to your Home page will immediately be taken to the new destination. If a visitor navigates to your Thinkific URL (yoursite.thinkific.com), they will automatically be taken to the redirected page instead, so your Home page will never be visible. Essentially, the redirect will send site visitors and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally accessed in their browser.
One way to think of it is like mail forwarding. When you move to a new home, the post office has an optional service called mail forwarding, which will make sure that you don't lose any mail as you transition from you old house to the new location. This applies websites as well. If you are moving from one URL to another or have a temporary page you would like your visitors to see when they access your site, a redirect can be used to make sure they get sent to the right place without the need to type in a unique URL in their browser!
Reasons for Redirecting Your Home Page
There is a range of different reasons as to why you may want to redirect your Thinkific Home page:
- Maybe you only plan to launch with one course or bundle and want students to navigate straight to that landing page
- Perhaps you already have an external site and would like your Thinkific site to only show the checkout for a particular Thinkific product
- You might have a Coming Soon or Lead collection page that you would like temporarily displayed while you get ready for launch
Either way, our Home Page Redirect feature can help you achieve that redirect without needing to dive into your theme code! When applying a Home Page Redirect, students who would otherwise go to your Thinkific Home page (yoursite.thinkific.com) will now navigate to the page you select as the new destination.
Things to be Aware of When Redirecting Your Home Page
Site Pages is replacing Site Builder in your Admin Dashboard! Beginning at the end of April, Site Pages will be rolling out to all Creators! Site Pages will allow you to simplify your site building experience to help you focus on what matters most — building and sharing your course. To learn more about these changes, check out our Site Pages Home article.
- Make sure that the page that you have the redirect pointed to is a published/live page, whether it be on Thinkific or another web page. If the page is not live, visitors will receive 404 errors.
- When a redirect is in place, you will still be able to access your Home page through Site Pages and edit it in Site Builder even though it will not be displayed to visitors. This means it can still be customized in the case you would like to use your Home page at a later date and do not want it visible just yet.
- If you set up a Home Page redirect and change your mind later, that is no problem. It can be removed in a few quick steps!
How to Set Up a Home Page Redirect in Thinkific
The following articles have detailed steps on how to add or remove a Home Page redirect this in Thinkific:
How to Redirect Your Home Page
How to Delete Your Home Page Redirect
Thinkific App Store
You can also check out Swiss in the Thinkific App Store, which allows you to set page redirects for other pages on your Thinkific site.