Automatic redirects when changing blog URLs

  • I am looking to change my blog url from the current format of emriver.com/year/month/title, to example.com/title.

    I am a little spooked by the giant warning at the top of the permalinks page.

    WARNING
    Do NOT change your permalink structure on a production site. Changing URLs can severely damage your SEO.

    I know that at the moment, if I type in a blog url in the form emriver.com/title, it will simply redirect to emriver.com/year/month/title. So my question is, if I change the format, will the redirects work automatically in the other direction? (i.e. if someone follows a link to emriver.com/year/month/title, will it redirect them to the correct page?) Is there actually any danger of affecting the SEO?

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Developing with WordPress topic

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Am I right in guessing you have the Yoast SEO plugin installed? I think this is where this warning comes from…

    My understanding is that as long as the old URLs redirect to the new with a 301 status code then this should tell the search engines that the pages have permanently moved to the new URL and then retain whatever standing they had previously.

    You can check the status code in the network tab of the browser console if you know how or if not you can probably Google a status checker like this one:

    Hope that helps…

    Thread Starter partynoparty

    (@partynoparty)

    Thanks @dominic_ks. We’re using the SEOPress plugin, but you’re probably right that the warning is coming from the plugin, and not WP. I suspected as much, but just wanted a few more opinions on the matter.

    I’m still curious about whether or not the blog redirects are created automatically by WP, or if that is something I will have to set up in htaccess.

    Oh sorry, I thought you said they DID work automatically. I actually don’t know, I think there are some that do, but you might need to test that out.

    Otherwise, you can go the .htaccess route, personally I don’t find that great to manage and prefer to keep the settings in WP itself.

    I have used this plugin with some success in the past:

    Quite nice as if you have a large number of posts you can import the redirects in bulk, though, you also have to get the list in the first place, but for that you can use something like this to export a list of posts:

    End of the day, probably better to be proactive to manage the redirects and making sure they’re in place and do a good bit of testing afterwards.

    Thread Starter partynoparty

    (@partynoparty)

    thanks @dominic_ks. I’ll look into that plugin.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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