Changing my permalinks structure

I decided to change my permalinks structure to no longer include %category% as part the url. I was thinking about long term maintenance and noticed a possible flaw in the current structure which is /category/post/. What happens if I decide to remove or rename a category? My url structure would change and break all incoming links. This is not a good experience for my readers.

I made the change transparent and this is how I did it.

Changed my permalinks structure through WP-Admin–>Options–>Permalinks to reflect the new structure shown below.

Old structure : /%category%/%postname%/

New structure : /posts/%postname%/

What happens to all the incoming links from other sites? Fixed that by using the permalink-redirect plug in by Scott Yang. See screenshot below.

The plug in was initially installed to help add a trailing slash “/” to all my posts url(s) and also redirect all www.thedaneshproject.com to thedaneshproject.com. This was to help improve the accuracy of traffic tracking through Google Analytics and Google Webmaster. Now it is playing a larger role by making my permalink changes transparent to all incoming links which may be pointing to my old structure. A sample of what it is doing,

“http://thedaneshproject.com/voip/major-skype-outage/” will now point to “http://thedaneshproject.com/posts/major-skype-outage/”

That’s it, now I’ll have to wait and if anything broke.

If you need any help applying the same changes to your WP blog please leave a comment or get in touch with me though the Contact Me form and I’ll be glad to help.

One Response to “Changing my permalinks structure”

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1. alanbernard says:

   August 20, 2007 at 6:37 am

   Yeah, it’s better in the long run… I found that categories, while helpful, can sometimes be very annoying as well, to me anyway. Some people tend to overdose with categories on their site, and their categories end up being like tags.

   Reply