Changing Permalinks and redirect help

  • homeschoolgardens

    (@homeschoolgardens)


    7 years, 9 months ago

    I recently migrated my site from wordpress.com to self hosted wordpress.org. I’m very new to this and trying to figure out what I think are two related topics.

    I’d like to change my permalinks from day and name to post name. I’ve read that this isn’t recommended for older blogs due to complexity. Mine is older but wasn’t all that active so I think mine counts as a newer blog because there’s not too much content.

    I can see where to change the permalinks but I’m not sure how to do the redirect step. I found this article from Yoast which has a link to their tool to create redirects. However, it says it only works for Apache based servers. I’m with Blue Host but I’m not sure if that’s Apache based. The next step involves placing it in my .htaccess file – but I have no idea what that is and from other posts I’ve read it makes me nervous. This is all very new for me.

    The other (possibly related) task I would like to do is redirect traffic from my old site to my new one. According to Blue Host and WordPress.com, it’s not possible because of two different hosts and because the old site is http and the new one is https. Their only suggestions was to post a message with a link on my old homepage and/or old posts. Is there a different way? I have several posts on the old site that have been shared widely and they are my main sources for traffic. I’d like that traffic to land on those posts on my new site.

    Many thanks,

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Davood Denavi

    (@binarywc)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    In order to provided the best support would you clarify for me whether you were using your own domain homeschoolgardens.com when you were on WordPress.com hosting or their subdomain?

    Thread Starter homeschoolgardens

    (@homeschoolgardens)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    Thank you for the reply. I have my own domain (homeschoolgardens.com) through GoDaddy which directed to homeschoolgardens.wordpress.com. I now have the name servers directed to Blue Host.

    Davood Denavi

    (@binarywc)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    Okay, so first, and foremost, you will want to make sure you delete your account on WP.com so that the content is not duplicated. Currently the site still loads at homeschoolgardens.wordpress.com. As far as I know, there is no way to correctly forward those links over to your self-hosted wp.org site on Blue host. If you have not already, until you have it up and running the exact way you want on blue host just login on wp.com and discourage search engines from crawling that site in order to stop them from picking it up and give you the old site to still refer to.

    Next, if you merely update the permalink settings under Settings >> Permalinks to have the structure you desire in your wp-admin wordpress should handle the rest. Meaning you should not have to deal with writing 301 redirects the php code should naturally handle that.

    Hope this helps.

    Thread Starter homeschoolgardens

    (@homeschoolgardens)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    Ok, I changed the permalinks and that seems to be fine.

    Yes, my old site is still up. The migration didn’t go as I expected. Many of my photos were not transferred. So, I’m going back through all my posts (on my new site) to make sure everything is okay and uploading photos. Luckily, it’s not a big site but it’s still annoying. Once that’s done, I can delete my old site.

    So, for the social media links that are out there pointing to my old site, there’s no way to redirect them to those same posts on the new site? I looked into a few plug-ins but they need to be installed on the old site in order to work…which isn’t possible on wp.com.

    Thanks for the help

    Davood Denavi

    (@binarywc)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    Correct if you linked to homeschoolgardens.wordpress.com and plan to stop paying for your plan over at wp.com there will be no way to forward the links. However, if you had your domain hooked up to the wp.com site the links will forward naturally.

    If you are want to keep the wp.com account and downgrade to the free account there are ways to forward the posts and pages to the correct location using plugins… I usually stay away from using plugins to forward the posts though because then you have to maintain two sites for the old content and if the plugin you choose breaks on an update you have to go through the process again. I am not very familiar with the Free WP.com accounts myself but last time I checked they did not include access to FTP. If they changed that and you now get access to FTP then you can write your own redirects for the old content in the .htaccess file. Let me know if you want instructions how to do that, I am happy to provide them; otherwise, I hope what I have provided here helps so far though.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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