Altering Your Site’s Permalink Structure

I made a rookie move while on Habari: I switched to using only post titles i.e. janetalkstech.com/%postname%. After I migrated from Habari to WordPress, I decided to keep that post structure i.e. janetalkstech.com/%postname%. Unfortunately for me, WordPress developers strongly recommend against setting up sites this way. After several days of seeing intermittent 500 errors and general site sluggishness (which, in hindsight, are likely attributable to WordPress having to do more work to figure out what post type the URL is referring to), I got the message and changed my site’s URL structure to janetalkstech.com/%year%/%postname%. Straight from the WordPress Codex:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties).

Changing my site’s URL structure was as simple as updating my permalinks options page, but with over 120 indexed posts, I needed to make sure that I:

  1. Didn’t annoy my visitors: For sites with less than 100 visitors daily like mine, I was not going to lose any money or get irate messages. However, I didn’t want to chase away the few visitors I have by throwing up a bunch of 404 – URL not found” messages. Instead, I needed to make sure I had a way to let them know that there would be a temporary break in “transmission” (so to speak). To do this, I needed to perform the change at a time when I had the lowest traffic volume. Again, I don’t make much money from this site, but if I did, it would not be smart to change my site’s links during the times of heaviest traffic!
  2. Had a plan for a seamless redirection: This was the biggest issue I needed to take care of before pulling the switch on my site’s structural change. I needed to make sure that the old posts were properly redirected i.e. a 301 redirect which tells Google/Search Engines that the old stuff is now at a different site. This is what Google recommends when you change a site or page’s url.

This time, I did the grunt work myself instead of going the Amazon Mechanical Turk route I used during my switch from Habari to WordPress. To make sure I didn’t leave my visitors in a lurch, I did the following:

  1. Exported my site’s contents in the WordPress WXR format and backed up my site’s database for good measure. It’s just good practice to have backing up data as a first step.
  2. Typed out an entire listing of my site’s posts by looking at my site’s Archives, grouped them by year and with a simple “search and replace” command in gedit, added the year (in which the post was written) to the URL so that janetalkstech.com/the-motorola-atrix became janetalkstech.com/2011/the-motorola-atrix.
  3. Manually created the redirections and a set of redirect rules with the Redirection Plugin. Instead of entering each redirect rule under the Redirection plugin’s “Redirects” tab, you can import a CSV, XML or RSS file into the plugin with the redirects you want and the plugin will do the rest of the work. Of course, the tedious part was entering the data into the CSV spreadsheet. The format for creating the CSV sheet is simple:
    • For each cell, enter the source/bad url, add a comma and then enter the target/good url.
    • Move on to the next cell below; Rinse and repeat.
    • You can verify the correct syntax for creating the redirect entries manually by exporting your current redirects from the Redirection plugin‘s “Modules” tab.
    • Double-check your work to make sure you have the correct redirections in your CSV sheet before importing!
    • I ended up with 122 cells containing redirects to the new URLs e.g.

  4. Installed the WP Maintenance mode plugin for WordPress and turned it on. Make sure you change the “Settings” for the Maintenance Mode plugin to “True”.
  5. Then, I changed my site’s permalinks by going to “Settings” and “Permalinks” while in the WordPress Administrative backend and entering “/%year%/%postname%“. I didn’t want trailing slashes at the end of my posts so I left out the trailing slash at the end. In my naiveté, it seems the current recommendation *is* to have a trailing slash at the end of URLs although that article is over a year old although Matt Cutts says the trailing slash doesn’t matter as much as picking the desired url style and sticking with it.
  6. Checked my CSV file for typos before importing into the Redirection Plugins’s “import” section. Creating a bulk CSV file to import your redirects is as simply as firing up Google Docs and creating cells in a Spreadsheet with the following information:
    1. source url which is the old/bad link e.g. http://janetalkstech.com/the-motorola-atrix
    2. literal comma
    3. target url which is the new links e.g. http://janetalkstech.com/2011/the-motorola-atrix
    4. Each cell of your spreadsheet should contain 1 redirect and be in this format: 
      janetalkstech.com/the-motorola-atrix,http://janetalkstech.com/2011/the-motorola-atrix

  7. I verified that all my links were being properly redirected by clicking on old links and casually inspecting my site’s HTTP headers (using Wireshark). So, I was reasonably satisfied that my links and corresponding link juice were being passed on to the new URLs.

    GET /using-habari-from-a-users-perspective HTTP/1.1
    Host: janetalkstech.com
    Connection: keep-alive
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.100 Safari/534.30
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
    Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
    Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:16:07 GMT
    Server: Apache
    X-Pingback: http://janetalkstech.com/xmlrpc.php
    Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
    Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
    Pragma: no-cache
    Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=x; path=/
    Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
    Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:16:13 GMT
    Location: http://janetalkstech.com/2009/using-habari-from-a-users-perspective
    Content-Encoding: gzip
    Content-Length: 20
    Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

    ………………..GET /2009/using-habari-from-a-users-perspective HTTP/1.1
    Host: janetalkstech.com
    Connection: keep-alive
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.100 Safari/534.30
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
    Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
    Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
    Cookie: PHPSESSID=x

  8. Turned off the WP Maintenance mode plugin and closely monitored my logs for any unusual drops in traffic.

Overall, thanks to the excellent Redirection Plugin by Urban Giraffe, I’ve been able to reliably handle the worst 404 errors that Google Webmaster Tools alerted me to. If you use this plugin, don’t forget to donate! I’ve got a long way to go (see image below) but baby steps. No more switching CMSes for me, that’s for damn sure. 🙂

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Jane Ullah

I wear many hats. In no particular order, I am a: wife, geeky blogger, a twitter-happy aspiring photographer, and passionate about things I believe in.