In page attributes you can make a page a child of a parent.
Make two new pages, one with a slug of 2023, and one with a slug of programme. They can be private and don’t need to have content.
Then change the slug of your 2023-programme-playfest to simply playfest.
Now go to your pages overvew on the WordPress main menu, and make playfest a child of programme. Then make programme a child of 2023.
Doing this will give the page a path of /2023/programme/playfest
All that is left to do is set up a permanent redirect from the old url to the new url.
Thank you both @zainshahidawan65 and @pichichi for your suggestions. They both sound like great solutions and thanks also @zainshahidawan65 for confirming that the SEO specialist is right so I don’t feel like it’s all for nothing! I haven’t tried either solution out yet – I’m going to get to it tonight. Can I just ask both of you if you have a view on which of these two solutions is easier to work with – assuming the result for both is identical. Secondly, can I also ask if there could be more levels, eg. 2022/programme/artists/percussion/congas
if requried, and would this be possible using either method.
Thank you both so much for your help and advice.
I think it depends on how you use the site.
The taxonomy route that @zainshahidawan65 suggested is the way to go if you are going to be adding lots of pages regularly, or use custom posts. It’s very scalable and flexible. A good solution for growing and large sites that need to categorise content such as yours.
If you just need to reorganise your URL stucture for a couple of dozen pages and won’t be adding many more regularly then you might find it simpler to nest the pages.
Thank you again, that’s very helpful. Now I’m stuck because when I go to ‘pages’ there is nothing to say ‘categories’. There is however, Projects on the Dashboard menu and that has a submenu for categories. Is this where I need to create the categories and subcategories? But then where does “projects” factor into the mix – I’ve never seen this before! Thank you for any more enlightenment you can shed @zainshahidawan65 and @pichichi
You would need to register taxonomies and associate them with your pages before you can use them. You can do this in a few ways, some plugins can do this for you if you are not comfortable coding. I havn’t used one so I cannot reccomend any.
There is good documentation for doing it manually, remember to backup your site before editing code, or use a staging site if your host provides this.
Overview of Taxonomies etc:
https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/categories-tags-custom-taxonomies/
Guide to creating your own plugin to register taxonomies:
https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/taxonomies/working-with-custom-taxonomies/
@pichichi so if “categories” are not on pages (only posts) and this sounds more complicated, do you think that using the method you suggested with parent/child might be my better option?