In WordPress how do you redirect all posts to main URL in an SEO friendly way?

Question

I'm working on a affiliate site that has a bunch of products on it. User clicks the product, and goes to the site the product is located on.

Here's my dilemma. All products on my site are each under a different WordPress post. I have about 1700 products.

When Google indexed "some" of my site so far, just submitted, I didn't think about what would happen if somebody clicks on a link to a "product" through a Google search. On my page I have the name of the product, the image of it, the price and then a button to click to head to the site (a CTA button).

So there is no actually other information for the product. So if a product is, for example, a blender. The user would see the name, the image, the price and then click the CTA button and be sent to the site. I don't have individually content for each product other then the price and everything. So I have no use for having a single.php page.

Not knowing this, When I clicked on a link that Google had index to one of the products, and when i did, it sent me to my site displaying a weird template with half the stuff missing on my site since I don't have a dedicated single.php page.

What I did was create a single.php page and redirect people to my home page. So if they land on, let's say example.com/category/name-of-product, it will redirect them to example.com where they can go view all my products. Is this the best way to handle this?

This is what I have in single.php.

<?php /*  
Template Name: Page Redirect
*/ 

header('Location: https://example.com');
exit();

?>

EDIT - I WAS PROVIDED THIS METHOD THROUGH ANOTHER USER INSTEAD OF USING HEADER DIRECT.

<?php wp_redirect( home_url() ); exit; ?>

Is there a better way to do this? Or is this sufficient enough? How bad will this affect the SEO? I have all my OG data all set, meta tags all set, and such.

Did I screw myself by not figuring this out before developing my site? In my "newbie" opinion, I believe redirecting all the links to the posts in Google to my home page would increase my home page thus resulting in better rankings for it. I'm probably wrong but would like other peoples opinions.

Answer 1

I think it is quite necessary to have individual pages for each product to have a successful e commerce site or an online store. If you will have product pages, then they can be a result in search engines which is a plus point for having individual pages. When a user click on a product link, then they expect to be taken straight to that page, rather than being dumped on page having so many products to get confused.

Answer 2

Redirecting to the home page is an error to Google. Google won't increase the value of your home page when other pages redirect to it. Google will report those redirects as "soft 404" errors in Google Search Console.

Here is Google's documentation about soft 404 errors: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en

You will need to find some other way to handle it other than redirecting to the home page. Redirecting to the home page is not SEO friendly.