WP GeoIP Country Redirect Review – Easy Geographic Redirection

True to its name, WP GeoIP Country Redirect is a handy little plugin that lets you redirect visitors to all or parts of your website based on their country (identified via IP address). You can choose to create a site-wide redirect or redirect by individual posts, pages, or categories. You can also add wildcard redirects to cover all possible scenarios.

In this review, I’ll tell you some of the ways in which WP GeoIP Country Redirect can help you, and then I’ll dig into the plugin and show you how it works.

How WP GeoIP Country Redirect Can Help Your Site

WP GeoIP Country Redirect opens up a ton of avenues for fine-tuning your site, especially if you’re active in multiple geographic markets.

For example, you can use the plugin to:

• Automatically redirect users to their correct language if you have a multilingual site – this can save your users the trouble of having to find and use your language switcher.
• Create country-specific landing pages and redirect users to the correct one – this is a great way to optimize your conversion rates by adding some personalization to your landing pages. You could also offer country-specific special deals.
• Block traffic from specific countries – this is one use I’m very familiar with, as Walmart blocks all traffic from Vietnamese IP addresses!
• Redirect users to different storefronts – if you’re running WooCommerce or another eCommerce plugin, you can redirect users to their correct storefront. Think how Amazon has different storefronts for different locations.

With wildcard redirects, you also have a ton of flexibility to use the plugin in a different way.

How WP GeoIP Country Redirect Works

The plugin is really simple to use. There’s no bloated interface to wade through, which I liked a lot.

Once you install and activate it, you get a new option in your WP Admin sidebar that lets you set up various redirect rules.

I’ll go through all your options below:

WPGeoIP Rules – Configure General Rules

This is the main tab for the plugin. It’s where you’ll create all your main redirect rules. Creating a rule is simple.

First, you select the country you want to target. The dropdown is sortable and includes all countries. You just start typing and the country will pop up.

Then, you select the posts, pages or categories you want to redirect for that country.

And finally, you enter the URL you want users to be redirected to. This can be an internal or external link.

So, for example, this rule would redirect anyone with a Vietnamese IP address to a different website “www.vietnamsite.com”:

Later on, I’ll do some tests to see whether or not that redirect works.

You can create as many rules as you want and export/import them if you need to back them up or move them between sites. I imagine the import/export is great for people using multi-site or running multiple websites.

WP GeoIP Once Redirect

WP GeoIP Once Redirect is a helpful feature that allows you to redirect users only one time. After the first time, they will no longer be redirected. You can set how long the cookie duration is. So, if you make the cookie expire after two days, visitors will only be redirected a maximum of one time every two days.

The only downside of this feature is that you don’t appear to be able to enable/disable it for specific rules. As far as I can tell, it’s all or nothing. It would be nice to have more control over when it was applied.

Mass Redirect For Countries Without Rules

This option lets you apply a mass redirect to all countries you haven’t created a rule for. To avoid putting users in a redirect loop, you can only use it to redirect to an external site.

I think this is a nice easy way to send away all unwanted traffic, but I’m not sure it has many other uses.

WP GeoIP NO Redirect

When enabled, this feature allows you to add “ ?noredirect=true” to the end of any URL to stop users from being redirected.

I see this as being helpful for testing or sending links to specific users.

WP GeoIP Excluded IP Addresses

Similarly, this feature allows you to add specific IP addresses that won’t be redirected.

I imagine this is mainly so you can exclude yourself and other site admins from being redirected.

Other Options – Logging

The plugin also includes detailed logging so that you can track how your redirects are functioning. This is great for catching potential problems or finding patterns. It’s probably not something you’ll check every day, but it’s nice to have the data in case an issue ever comes up.

Does WP GeoIP Country Redirect Work?

Ok, so now for the million dollar question:

Does the plugin actually work at redirecting users?

I’ll test with my own Vietnamese IP address. I already created a rule for Vietnam, so let’s see if I get redirected to “vietnamsite.com” when I try to visit my test site:

Bingo! Worked perfectly. That was a sitewide redirect though – what if I make it just a single post? (Note, I switched to a production site because the redirects didn’t function on my localhost).

The result? I was able to click around my entire site until I clicked on that specific post. Then, I was instantly redirected.

After playing around with a few more options, I can say that, at least for my Vietnamese IP address, the plugin works perfectly.

A Word of Warning for People with Caching Plugins

The only caveat of this plugin is that it doesn’t play nice with caching plugins. The devs are very open about this – they’re not trying to mislead you in any way:

It’s just a limitation of the technology. One thing to note is that if you only want to redirect a specific page, you only need to disable caching for that page. You can leave caching on for the rest of your site.

So, unless you want to create lots of site-wide redirects, I don’t think this is a huge issue.

WP GeoIP Country Redirect Pricing

WP GeoIP Country Redirect is competitively priced at just $14. It’s sold via CodeCanyon, so you can expect standard Envato licensing. You get 6 months of support included and can extend that to 12 months for an additional $3.75.

Final Thoughts

If you need this plugin’s functionality, I think it’s a great option. I love how simple the interface is – for the most part, they give you all the options you need, without any bloat. Creating rules is simple and takes no learning curve.

In my tests, the plugin functioned perfectly, though obviously I didn’t test every single country.

The only option I would like to see added is the ability to enable or disable the one-time redirect option for individual rules.

That’s a small criticism, though. And for only $14, I think WP GeoIP Country Redirect is a bargain.