Hi all, needless to say I have some concerns about this but the boss in this situation isn’t budging, so I thought I’d ask if anyone has any experience with this kind of situation.
We’re currently using a simple url.com/post-name structure, and the intent is to move to a url.com/cat-name/post-name structure. The move itself makes sense, but obviously I have some reservations when it comes to broken links/SEO.
My plan is to use a 301 redirect plugin to basically redirect /%post-name%/ to /%category-name%/%post-name%/ since the plugin allows that sort of syntax when setting up parameters. I’m a little nervous to flip any switches here for obvious reasons (we’re talking about many thousands of articles), so I just thought I’d check in here first…basically see if anyone’s navigated a similar situation, or if my proposed plan is a disaster in the making, etc.
Any help or insight is much appreciated!
Edit: I should mention that the reason for this move is purely for GA4 analytics tracking by category.
You could use a plugin that redirects 404s to home, in case you miss anything.
You don’t need to use a plugin. You can do it right in your .htaccess file, which you can access via FTP. The syntax is like:
`Redirect 301 /blog-post https://website.com/category/blog-post`
The first value after `301` is the relative link to the old post. The URL is the place you want to redirect to. It’s actually much simpler to do it this way than to use a plugin.