changing permalink gives 404 error for old links

Question

I have changed the permalink from Post name to Custom Structure.

Earlier my blog links were like www.website.com/blog-post-link i want to change that to www.website.com/my-articles/blog-post-link so my custom structure permalinks looks as following and it does give me what I want

https://website.com/my-articles/%postname%/

However all the old links are now giving 404 error www.website.com/blog-post-link

What can I do so that old links get redirected to the new link and does not give page not found error. I have 100s of blog post, i hope i dont have to manually do a redirect for each blog post.

I came across this question but it does not seem to work for me

Answer 1

Well, if your /%postname%/ part stays the same, .htaccess redirection can help you pointing old urls to the new ones like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ /my-articles [R=301,L]

Put this into your .htaccess file and it should redirect http://your.tld/my-article to http://your.tld/my-articles/my-article.

Beware that this will redirect everything, not only some post types or sth. like that. But .htaccess is very powerful and gives you lot of options to redirect or rewrite URLs.