How To: Switching Your WordPress Blog’s Permalink Stucture

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about WordPress permalink structure (where a good discussion took place in the comments), I decided today that I would dedicate a post to showing you how to switch your blog’s permalink structure without creating any invalid URL’s.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to grab the Permalink Redirect plugin (my plugin review here) and activate it.  Once activated, when you go into the Settings panel you should find a new tab called Permalink Redirect. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you should see this:

In the old permalink structures box, you can paste your current permalink structure there (depending on which you choose, something like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/).  If you are unsure what exactly to type, please refer to the permalink page on the WordPress Codex.

Now save and go to the Permalinks tab.   Select the custom field and type /%postname%/, then save.

Now go to an old URL and it should automatically redirect you to the same post’s new URL.   The search engines will see the 301 redirect and update accordingly!

Any questions?  Feel free to comment below!

Update: I believe the plugin has changed since this was written.  If you are comfortable updating your .htaccess file, you can instead redirect all your links to the new /%postname%/ url by adding the following:

RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4