How to Change Permalinks Without Breaking Your WordPress Site:
Changing permalink structure is major adventure for your website. You should be sure before changing the permalinks to your site because it may leads to major impact on your SEO. Each page and post of your site has a unique permalink url assigned to it. These unique permalinks are created using predetermined structure. Changing structure might be necessary sometime but can cause issues with search engine ranking, outdated links from external sites, broken links within your content.
Best way to avoid these kinds of permalink issues is to have a clear strategy before you do so. Then you can switch safely & get benefits from a more optimized permalink structure. Additionally you must know how to implement redirects in order to avoid 404 errors.
In today’s post we will discuss what permalinks are and the reasons for changing them on your site. Also we provide instructions on how we can alter permalink structure safely & avoid internal & external errors from broken links by using redirects.
What are permalinks?
Permalink is a part of web address that follows domain name. when set correctly permalinks, serve several important purpose.
- Allow your visitors to get brief understanding of what your page & post is about without going through the content.
- Search engine use permalinks to discover page & post solely from url.
- Supply a permanent location for readers & search engines to return in order to read the content.
- They are necessarily a unique identifier for each piece of content that you create, helping you keep everything setup.
To set the permalink structure of WordPress site you need to go through settings-> permalinks in your dashboard. Mostly people will change the structure of permalink at its creation.
Why would I change my permalink structure?
There are numerous reasons why you would consider changing permalink structure especially when you are using default setting. Changing permalink setting whether on a new site or established one is very easy. However making changes to link structure on established site can have negative impact if you don’t plan ahead. Therefore you should consider whether or not it is important to alter permalink structure.
However there are various valid reasons for switch the structure. Some of them are:
- If you have started with older version of WordPress you may still using the previous default structure which includes post ID. This structure doesn’t provide any information about content & is worthless for SEO.
- You may be taking your website in different direction and need to update the permalink structure to reflect the changes.
- Many people buy established sites as an investment, so it’s possible that you have inherited or purchased site from someone else. If you have taken ownership of live site, you may want to update the link structure for rebranding.
How to Change Permalinks Without Breaking Your WordPress Site
Before making any changes to your site it’s important to make a backup of your site. It’s also good to test changes on a staging site before implement them on live site so you can troubleshoot any issue that rises. Here are the steps to change permalink structure of your site.
- Step-1:- Decide on New Permalink Structure:- first decision you have to make is syntax of your permalink structure. When choosing a new structure you have to decide what you want to include in link.
- Step-2:- Change your permalink structure in WordPress:- once you know which syntax you want to use it’s time to go into permalinks menu of your dashboard and make changes. Navigate to settings-> permalinks in wordpress backend and make selection from available options. Once you select your choice click on save. Now your permalinks are updated.
- Step-3:- Fix broken links with 301 redirects:- changing your permalink structure is easy. However you have to deal with fallout. All prior link, within your content or on external sites is now broken. Additionally the content that has been indexed on search engines is also incorrect. Simple solution of this problem is to setup 301 redirects. 301 redirect tells browser any browser that comes to your site through old url where the relevant content is. Also it lets search engines that url is permanently changed. Probably you also want to customize 404 page as well to catch internal or manual broken links that you have overlooked.
- Step-4:- Changing search engine links to new structure (Re-indexing):- As we mentioned earlier that search engines will have incorrect information after you have changed your permalink structure. Unfortunately this is not in your control as a website owner. Search engines regularly crawl and update your links when they find changes. So this problem is fixing itself over time.
However you can help this process by creating xml sitemap and manually re-indexing your site with major search engines.