As you read recently or maybe you just noticed it on your own, I changed my permalink structure. I removed the date reference which made it shorter and less “dated”. One side effect of this step was that WordPress wasn’t smart enough to forward old links to the new format. I suspected this but I’ve changed post titles (and post slugs) in the past where the links still worked. But maybe they didn’t or maybe that was different than changing the permalink structure. Either way, I had to fix the redirects but writing 301 redirects for all links would be near impossible. That is unless you find a plugin. And I found a plugin. Actually, I found two but only used one.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration is the one I ended up using. With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn?t hurt your google pagerank. It efectively creates a 301 redirect for your old permalink structure.
Permalinks Moved Permanently grabs the slug from the end of the request and checks if there?s a post with this slug living somewhere else on your blog. If so, it will generate a ?301 Moved Permanently? error, and forward your user to the new location of your post.
These two plugins essentially do the same thing (301 redirect) and may even do it the same way (behind the scenes). So if you’re considering changing your permalink structure, grab one of these plugins and go for it. Just make sure you choose a good permalink structure – site/blog/year/month/day/hour/category/author/tag/post-id is probably not a very good idea – I’m just saying.
