Yes, we have prevented you from adding new 301 redirects in the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO meta box. And we have a couple of very good reasons for that.
As it was, it was virtually impossible to keep track of what post is redirected where. You’d have to open each post or visit each URL to find out. This was causing quite a mess over time.
Our Yoast SEO Premium customers, who have access to a far better redirects module, often ran into posts that were redirected while no redirect was set in the redirects module. Having to manage redirects in a couple of different locations really is undoable.
Checking for the set 301 redirect also requires us to do an extra query on every pageload. Which means we had to slow your website down a bit, just to check if there was a redirect set. Since speed is gaining importance as a ranking factor, we are constantly looking how we can further optimize our plugin. This query isn't gone yet, but we want to change how we do these redirects and are looking at ways to optimize this. The first step is to prevent new redirects from being created this way.
However, as said, we’re not yet removing the entire functionality. All your redirects will still work. Your website will not be impacted in any way, we only stopped you from adding more redirects this way.
Your redirects aren’t lost. They’re safely stored in your database and if you decide to switch to Yoast SEO Premium, all of them will be automatically imported in the redirects-module.
If you’re worried we’re going to slowly move the whole plugin to premium, have you seen that we just moved the complete Google Search Console integration from the Premium to the free plugin?
Don’t worry. We’re here to stay and we want you to be able to do SEO for your WordPress website in the best way possible.
Best,
Joost