Simple question about changing page URLs and redirects

  • Hey guys,

    So I am running a website for the small company I work at. I just changed the URLs of a significant amount of our pages (not posts, we don’t really use them) to increase search engine visibility. The URLs didn’t change in structure, for the most part I just added a few keywords that should have been there the whole time. Do I need to set up 301 redirects to keep the search engine rankings of the original pages? When I click an old link on Google, it automatically redirects already, so I didn’t know if WordPress had already done it for me. I just want to know if asking Google to crawl again to index the new links would cause us to ‘start over’ in ranking if I don’t set up 301s. Thanks!

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  • Perhaps you are running a Redirection plugin? WordPress by default does not set up 301 redirects that I am aware of.

    I personally run a plugin called ‘Redirection’ that if you change a post address from within WordPress admin console it automatically creates the 301 for you. However, I changed a page this week and it didnt seem to pick that up, so perhaps it only does posts?!

    Anyway, you can set up the 301 redirect in your .htaccess file if you have access by something like:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RedirectMatch 301 /old-page-name/ https://yourwebsite/new-page-name/
</IfModule>

    Don’t forget that browsers can cache redirects and if you get it wrong the first time via a typo or something then the only way to clear the cache is to do a full browser cache delete all.

    Hope this help!

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