Change Category Slug within WordPress
When I first started this blog, I set the category "slug" to "sugar." Why sugar? Because a lot of a good thing is candy; thus, a bunch of MooTools tutorials is as sweet as sugar. While I get a giggle out of calling my categories sugar, Google doesn't find it nearly as funny, nor does Yahoo or Bing. In an effort to increase my SEO, I wanted to change my category slug to "tutorials." That's where the awesome Redirection plugin and a simple regular expression comes into place.
Changing the Slug
You can very easily change the category slug within WordPress's admin panel by navigating to Settings >> Permalinks:
I changed the slug from "sugar" to "tutorials."
WordPress Redirection
So why do we need the Redirection plugin? Because search engines like Google and users who have bookmarked your site will try to reach the old address. Thus, we need an appropriate redirect to push them to the new address. Not only do we need a redirection plugin but we need it to be reliable. I've been using Redirection for years so I knew this would be the best route.
While Redirection allows you to make a simple URL to URL redirection, I needed something a bit more powerful since almost anything could be after "/sugar/" in the URL. What I did was use Redirection's regular expression capabilities to create a wildcard search on the URL to redirect all "/sugar/" URLs to "/tutorials/" URLS:
And there I have it; all category URLs are redirected as they should be! The (*) in the source URL grabs the text after "/sugar/" in the URL and the $1 in the Target URL places that text after the new category slug!
The Redirection plugin for WordPress is outstanding. As I mentioned above, I've used it for years, have hundreds of redirections in place, and it's always been one of my most trusted plugins. Thanks to John Godley for his great plugin!
Comments
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That works well if you’re changing category base. However, if you’re familiar with htaccess (granted most WordPress owners aren’t) and don’t want to use a plugin, you could do the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sugar/(.*) tutorials/$1 [L,R=301]
Furthermore, if you’re migrating your legacy category structure over to tags (via the admin) and want to prevent broken links, you could write a rule to handle the change:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^category(?:/[^/]+)*(/[^/]+) tag$1 [L,R=301]
(Where ‘category’ was the old structure and ‘tag’ is the new structure. The regex handles sub-categories, which now become hierarchy-less tags.)
Yep, you can edit .htaccess directly, but that can be cumbersome for those who aren’t well versed with coding rewrites.
“/me likes simon post”
I definitely prefer to use a plugin for something like this. My .htacess file is bloated enough.
I think this solution is for one category… what if i want to change many category’s slug? help would be appreciated
i have a big problem and maybe you can help me.
site/category/apple and site/apple are showing me the same thing. how can i redirect the second one to the first one through htaccess.
my post structure is site/apple/id/post/
thanks
Hi,
Thanks for this!
I recently changed my url structure from
http://theadventurouswriter.com/quipstipsworkingworld/
to
http://theadventurouswriter.com/working/
And now I need to reroute the incoming links so they go to the correct place.
I tried inserting the urls themselves in the Redirection plugin’s source and target fields, but that didn’t work.
Can you tell me what to insert in the source and target fields, to make this plugin work for me?
Cheers,
Laurie
I am having the same issue as targoviste, As he said: “site/category/apple and site/apple are showing me the same thing” is this normal? How do I fix this?
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The best is to think wisely when you set up the site and stick to the link structure you’ve chosen. It’s almost impossible to redirect all the links Google already has indexed.