I’m helping overhaul a WordPress website with hundreds of blog posts. The site has operated for years with essentially no sensible strategy for category hierarchy, while still randomly implementing some rather nonsensical hierarchies.
I want to restructure that hierarchy so it makes more logical sense, but I understand this will change long-standing permalinks, specifically for the archives. Some categories will get new parent cats, some will become parents that currently aren’t, others will become children that are currently parents, and so on…there’s a lot to fix.
Is WordPress, for lack of a better word, “smart” enough to handle this on its own or should I expect to have to account for every change by creating redirects? (I generally use the Redirection plugin by John Godley.)
If WP can handle it sufficiently, I’ll probably get started. If not, I’ll have to kick the can down the road as I’m not sure I have the mental bandwidth for that kind of undertaking right now.
TIA
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WordPress *should* be able to handle moving cats up or down in hierarchy, but I wouldn’t rely on it, so you should definitely setup redirects for any changes you’re making.
I know when you change a page or post permalink , wordpress will automatically redirect the old permalink to the new one. I doubt this applies to categories but my suggestion would be to identify the top X (20? 50?) visited category permalinks before making this change and establish manual 301 redirects to retain ranking or traffic where applicable.
Only you can tell how many to do, just use judgement based on traffic numbers perhaps.