Colin Walker

Changing permalinks

Colin Walker

Ever since I moved to WordPress I have had my permalink structure set as /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ which served well enough. With the increase in microblogging and posts without titles, however, this structure looks a bit messy as the post permalinks also include date and time, such as: 13-12-2017-1127.

Not nice.

So I wanted to change the structure to just /%postname%/ which looks much nicer. The only problem is that changing it means links will no longer work unless redirection is in place.

I was looking for the best way to do this and came across the “Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress” by Dean Lee.

This is a great little plugin! All you do is copy your current permalink structure into the plugin settings page and click to update. Then you are free to change your permalink settings to any other option and all links will be redirected.

No messy link lists or .htaccess editing required and my post URLs are much cleaner.

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  2. svens says: #
    Nice! I'm not much of fan of the date thingy and trialed a similar format. Sadly that messed up all kinds of things in unexpected places, also I figured in the process that it is occasionally convenient to see the publish date in the adress bar. Eventually I switched it back. Still don't know whether it was wise or not.
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  3. Colin Walker says: #
    I haven't seen any issues so far but am not completely ruling them out just yet 😉 Hopefully the plugin will keep problems to a minimum. I think the date format was okay before but with the duplication due to title-less posts it just looked messy.
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  4. svens says: #
    Totally agree on that. I had the format $category/post title Which looked nice even when the post title is just a random number. But that caused all kinds of pain when a post had like two categories or such. Bizarrely I had Twitter embeds disappearing and changed to embedded WordPress posts.
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  5. Robert Diana says: #
    One reason to use real post titles is for clickability. Unless you have a huge following, the title of a post lures people in. I am guilty of this as much as anyone, especially when the feed does not include more than a sentence or two.
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    1. Colin Walker says: #
      Clickability is not really my concern and I think the reliance on titles is often overstated which is why so much is now title-less.
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      1. Robert Diana says: #
        Far too busy as usual. This is probably obvious from the lack of activity on my blog. I will admit, I was happy to see you and others writing on their blogs again.
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