Changing WordPress Permalinks

I had previously blogged about the best wordpress permalink setting. I had explained why the ‘custom setting’ is the best option.

If you have selected one of the other permalink settings then I highly recommend that you move to custom setting.

There is one thing you need to do when you change your option to custom setting for your existing blog…

When you move to custom setting bear in mind that the back links of your old posts will break.

Let’s say you originally selected the ‘default setting’ and have a post http://www.imbizjourney.com/?p=789.

Once you change your setting to ‘custom setting’, this post with id will now have a name and not a number as the file name. Assume that this post has a heading ‘Tunturi’ – So the new url of this post is http://www.imbizjourney.com/tunturi/.

All the back links of the post will still be pointing to http://www.imbizjourney.com/?p=789. But this page does not exist anymore as it now has a new name – http://www.imbizjourney.com/tunturi/. And so all the back links will break.

Back links are very valuable – you cannot let it go waste. So, when you change your permalink setting, do one of the following:

• Create a redirection – redirect old page to new page – in my case ‘http://www.imbizjourney.com/?p=789′ to ‘http://www.imbizjourney.com/tunturi/’.I normally use a plugin for all my redirects but if you are geeky enough you can set up redirects in your .htaccess file.
• If you don’t want to create a redirect – then when someone clicks on the back link they will land on your 404 error page – ‘Page Not Found’ page – You can create a custom 404 page and direct your visitors to your sitemap, so that they can find what they are after

I prefer redirects – simple and no mess.

Have you ever changed the permalink setting of one of your existing blogs ? If you did then please share with us any other problems you faced in the process…

Best,