How to deal with internal links in blog while developing new site in WordPress?

Question

I have a client for whom I'm developing a new WP site. Their current site uses DNN but due to security reasons (among others) they have chosen WordPress.

As we are migrating and updating blog content there are many internal links pointing to pages in their old site.

Their url structure is: https://www.example.com/resources/blog-name/title-of-post

However in the new site the structure will be: https://www.example.com/blog-name/title-of-post

What is the best way to deal with this? Should we go in the dev server as we are transferring content and just change the links manually with the future address in mind?

Also, should I be using 301 redirects? We understand that we will take an SEO hit but I want to make sure I minimize this and I am looking for some tips/advice since we have over 1000 articles.

Thanks

Answer 1

For the best SEO results (and the best likelihood that human visitors will get where they're trying to go), you should do two things:

1. Update the URLs in the database. Usually this is best left until the end; once you have all the content moved onto the dev/staging site and you're about ready to go live, you can run a script to search and replace the old URLs with the new ones.

2. Add 301 redirects for everything. It looks like this will be a fairly simple step based on the structure you specified; you can simply redirect everything in the resources folder to (site)(whatever was after /resources/ in the old URL). This way, visitors who click an outdated link will still get to the right page, and the 301s also signal to search engines that you've permanently moved the content.

Answer 2

Similar answer to WebElaine but you could simply use .htaccess to rewrite the URLs with one line:

RewriteRule ^resources/blogname/(.*)$ /blogname/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

This would be better (SEO wise) than updating your database straight away. Wait till search engines have begun to index the new URLs.