Automatically redirect (301) after permalinks changes

When I started my wordpress website I created categories and subcategories like

 - Cars
     - News
     - Shows
     - Conferences
 - Phones
     - News
     - Shows
     - Conferences

etc

A news article about phones would have the URL

– domain.com/phones/news-phones/slug

while a news article about cars would be

– domain.com/cars/news-cars/slug

I find this bad, now, after I have 300 articles. Both from a SEO point of view as well as sorting, displaying categories on the website etc.

I am thinking of doing something like

– Cars
– Phones
– News
– Shows
– Conferences
And set 2 categories for an article, where one of them is set to primary.

1st question I have: Is there a way to change the permalinks so that the old article on URL domain.com/cars/news-cars/slug will be 301’ed to the new URL.
Generally, the old URLs are just lost and accessing them would do a 404.

2nd question: is there a better way to create categories so that all articles would looks like

domain.com/cars/news/slug
domain.com/games/news/slug
domain.com/phones/news/slug

• This topic was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Dimu.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Dimu. Reason: Formatting