How to Survive a Category and Permalink Overhaul on your Wordpress Blog

I’ve recently changed the permalink structure for Dosh Dosh and reorganized the categories for my articles. The whole process involved almost every post on Dosh Dosh and led to a large amount of 404 error pages showing up on this site.

This short article details the plugins I’ve used to go through the whole task of renovating my category and permalink structure. I thought it’ll be useful to share my experience of the process.

SEO-Friendly Permalinks for Wordpress

Before the permalink change, I was already running what Wordpress Codex calls pretty permalinks, or permalinks with descriptive text instead of just numbers and ids. Pretty permalinks allow you to have keywords in the URL and some have suggested that this could possibly improve your search engine rankings.

I was previously using /%category%/%postname%/ as my permalinks and redirected them to the shorter /%postname%/ format because I found that my old URLS were too long and unwieldy.

Another reason is the limitation caused by using categories in the permalink structure, which made my post ’stuck’ to the category I’ve initially assigned it.

Four Plugins you Need to Overhaul your Permalinks and Categories

Changing the permalink and category structure for your Wordpress blog is not a difficult process at all, due to the existence of some very resourceful plugins that will help you to do a lot of the dirty work.

Everything can be done through your dashboard or feed reader and you won’t even have to check your logs or access your .htaccess file at all.

Here are the four main plugins that I recommend using:

• Permalinks Migration Plugin. This nifty plugin allows you to change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website and allows you to maintain your search ranks as well. What this does is that it generates a 301 redirect whenever anyone assesses your site through the old permalinks, thereby sending them to the new permalink structure. This is very easy to implement and will only take a few minutes to set up.
• Batch Categories. This plugin should be used when you need to remove old categories and transfer many posts to the new categories you’ve set up. It allows you to assign or delete multiple posts to or from a category at one shot.
  You won’t be needing this plugin if you’re not originally using the category id in the permalink structure, although you can still use it to create new categories for your posts.
• Objection Redirection. This very cool plugin allows you to 301 redirect users and search engine bots from 404 error pages that result from old permalinks to existing webpages with the new permalinks. This is extremely easy to use and has saved me a lot of time because I didn’t have to manually enter the redirects within the .htaccess file. A real lifesaver if you are changing permalinks and need to fix those 404s.
• 404 Notifier. This plugin logs 404 error pages whenever they are accessed by a bot or a user and informs you via RSS or email. You can then do a redirect on the error page to the correct webpage using the Objection Redirection plugin above. What I do is that I’ll subscribe to my 404 notifications via RSS and then log into the Dashboard to redirect the old webpages.

I only took around an hour to do all the redirection/post shifting work and a few minutes everyday to double check for 404 pages I might have overlooked.

There are around 225 posts on Dosh Dosh and since the permalink overhaul a week ago, I have not seen any drop in search engine rankings or traffic at all. In fact, search traffic seems to have increased on the whole but there’s probably because I’ve been doing some volume blogging.

If you’ve ever wanted to change your permalinks but was afraid of losing your search traffic, perhaps you might want to consider doing so again. It’s perfectly safe and there’s nothing to worry about if you take the right precautions.