Rewriting URLs and Doing WordPress Redirects Without .htaccess - Rename or Change WordPress URL: Exact Steps

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Step 1: Make sure the post or page editor under “Manage Post” or “Manage Pages” is a direct HTML code for easy backup to notepad. To do this: go to Users – Click “Admin” under Username – make sure “Use Visual Editor when writing” is unchecked.

Step 2: Back up your entire post/page content first.

To do this is to:

1. Go to “Manage Post” or “Manage Pages” in the WP admin panel.

2. Open the post for editing, then select all and copy to notepad.

3. Save the notepad as the name of your post or page content, for example “ This is a post 1.txt”

Step 3: Open your post in a browser, copy your old URL as what is exactly shown in the browser address bar (complete details such as “http://www.mywordpresssite.com/this-is-a-post-1/) and save it to a separate notepad file. You can name this, for example, “oldURL.txt.”

Step 4: Also, note to which categories the old post belongs and copy all of them to a notepad file, which you might name “categories1.txt.”

Step 5: Go to Wp-admin panel again and click “Write” ---“Post”. In the title field put down the phrase you want to include in the URL. For example:

1. You want the URL to contain keywords, such as “ http://www.mywordpresssite.com/alien-widgets”

2. Write down “Alien Widgets” at the title of the new post. WordPress will automatically convert upper case to lower case and place a hyphen between words.

Step 6: Copy and paste the content of “This is a post 1.txt” to the new post's content field.

Step 7: Assign categories based on “categories1.txt.”

Step 8 : Publish the Post.

At this time, you have two URLs containing the same content. These are:

http://www.mywordpresssite.com/this-is-a-post-1/

http://www.mywordpresssite.com/alien-widgets/

We want http://www.mywordpresssite.com/alien-widgets/ as the permanent location of the content. So the next step is:

Step 9: Do a 301 redirect from www.mywordpresssite.com/this-is-a-post-1/ to www.mywordpresssite.com/alien-widgets/

Using the Redirection plugin (see screen shot):

Then click “Add Redirection.” It is very simple.

Step 10: Confirm that the status of redirection is 301. Use this tool:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

Step 11: You can safely delete the old post in your admin panel to avoid confusion in future editing.

Type the old URL in the box, and then check the results. It should give:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently and Redirect target should be: Redirect Target: http://www.mywordpresssite.com/alien-widgets/

DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware.

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