Redirect Plugin: Redirecting or Rewriting?

[HashtagHustler]

Hey everybody!  It's been a while since off the boards!

I am reworking a site and I have been looking into their Redirection Plugin. I personally tend to lean towards just using the .htaccess because, well, why not. However, when looking deeper into the plugin I found myself a little confused with their redirection wording.

RewriteRule ^/products/landing-page-october-2015/$ /products/special-education-news-october-2015/ [R=301,L]

Is that the same thing as a classic Redirect 301?

[GlobeRunner]

Yes, it has the same result. One reason why we typically don't recommend editing the .htaccess file yourself in WordPress, for example, is that other Plugins may rely on editing/changing it. For example, security plugins like Wordfence may update it, and WordPress' permalinks, for example, need access to update the file as well.

On WordPress, we typically use the Redirection plugin without any problems.

[HashtagHustler]

Thank you!

I just always felt like, why use the plugin? When I could hard code it in on a server level. It wouldn't even need the website to still get the redirects!