Moderator
t-p
(@t-p)
Yes.
The change should update all of your internal URLs with the new syntax. All of the internal links should update correctly if they have been added as part of WordPress.
However, all links to your site from elsewhere will now be completely broken and all the content indexed by search engines will be incorrect.
Fixing External Links With 301 Redirects:
There is a simple solution to this problem and that is to setup 301 redirects on your website. A 301 redirect essentially tells any browser that comes to your site using an old permalink structured URL where the relevant content is. It also lets search engines know that this is a permanent change.
In the past you would have been required to add all of these redirects manually to your .htaccess file on your web server. Thankfully, with WordPress there are plugins that can take care of all of these things for you.
To easily create the redirects on your WordPress using plugins such as the Simple 301 Redirects plugin.
Thread Starter
Cory
(@corypina)
Thanks, Tara. I see that all the URLs get changed internally. But what you’re describing—the old links being broken—is not what I’m experiencing.
If I manually browse to an old link, e.g., http://mysite.com/older-post the system already directs me to the new link http://mysite.com/2013/12/older-post with no problem.
This seems like great news to me, but I hear you saying this isn’t normal behavior. Is that true?
(I’m also not concerned about search engines, as we’re running a private, password-protected site directing search engines to ignore us.)
Moderator
t-p
(@t-p)
But what you’re describing—the old links being broken
No, I am not saying that.
I am rffering to external links to your site from elsewhere
Another thing to remember is that any links inside your post/page content will still point to the old URL as well. These can’t easily be changed as they are all hard-coded into each post. You can go through these manually, but depending on how many posts you have it could get quite tedious.
