Performed Major Surgery on the Blog: Changing Permalinks and SEO Plugin

Previously, Naiba wrote an article introducingWordPress Best Permalink Settings_Which Permalink Type is BetterThe article stated that the best WordPress permalinks are numeric, post name, or custom. In the early hours of yesterday,Naibabijiswitched the SEO plugin from All in One SEO Pack to Yoast SEO. When using the Yoast SEO wizard, it suggested changing the original numeric permalinks to post name permalinks. After sleeping on it, considering the long term, I decided to change the website's permalinks, as shown below:

Reasons for Changing Permalinks

Changing a website's permalinks is a very cautious matter from an SEO perspective; if not done properly, it can lead to a decrease in search engine ranking. Based on the following reasons, I ultimately decided to make the change.

1. Numeric permalinks have low recognizability
2. WordPress WeChat Mini ProgramDoes not support article redirection for numeric permalinks
3. Post name permalinks are more beneficial for SEO and recognition

Actually, I had considered changing permalinks when building the WordPress WeChat Mini Program before, but I didn't proceed then due to SEO concerns. Although numeric permalinks are simple and don't require manually modifying post slugs, their recognizability is too low. Often, when users ask Naiba about website issues, I would casually send the corresponding URL for them to see, but a string of numbers makes it hard to tell the article content, so now I've changed to a pinyin format. Additionally, I added categories to the permalinks, making them look like a secondary directory, to test if this structure helps SEO.

Website SEO Data When Changing Permalinks

To experiment with the impact of this WordPress permalink change on website SEO, I'm recording the current website SEO data. As of November 2nd

• Baidu Indexed 167
• Google Indexed 771
• 360 Indexed 67
• Bing Indexed 2680
• Sogou Indexed 149
• Average traffic in the last 3 days is between 400-500

What Did I Do When Changing Permalinks?

1. Change SEO Plugin

Switched from the free version of All in One SEO Pack to the premium cracked version of Yoast SEO. I have also used the free version of Yoast SEO before, and it feels quite similar to All in One SEO Pack. However, I saw a relatively well-known blogger in the foreign trade circle online yesterday suggesting that his students purchase the premium version after becoming familiar with Yoast SEO. So, I casually installed the Yoast SEO premium version to experience what different advantages it actually has. I will write an article comparing the two SEO plugins, All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO, when I have time. For now, it seems the same as Naiba's previous feeling—they are quite similar. However, Yoast SEO's interface and translations are more beginner-friendly. The most crucial keyword density feature of Yoast SEO is not suitable for Chinese websites, so users of English websites can prioritize Yoast SEO.

2. Change Permalinks

In the backend settings, changed the permalink structure from numeric to a custom format.

3. Modify the slug for each post and set up 301 redirects

This was a labor-intensive task. If the slug is not modified, the default URL suffix directly uses the Chinese article title, which looks very unappealing. Therefore, I manually changed all article slugs to pinyin form. (Of course, you can also use theWordPress Article, Category, and Tag Page URLs Automatic Conversion to English Pinyin Plugin) However, converting long Chinese article titles entirely to pinyin results in overly long URLs. Manually naming the slugs is a bit better. After changing the permalink structure, the URLs for all articles on the entire website changed, so I needed to set up 301 redirects one by one. Yoast SEO has this feature built-in, as shown in the image below:377 301 redirect rules. Adding the slugs and setting up the 301 redirects took a full day.

4. Modify internal links in posts to the new post URLs

Typically, website articles contain some internal links. Initially, I modified them manually article by article. Later, I suddenly thought of doing a batch replacement in the database, which took over 2 hours to complete. The database batch modification was done usingWordPress Batch Find and Replace Plugin and Code for Modifying Article Content

5. Modify other links and resubmit the sitemap

There were still some old permalink URLs in the website theme and menus, which were manually updated to the new URLs. The previous sitemap file format was sitemap.xml. After installing Yoast SEO, the generated file is named sitemap_index.xml. Although sitemap.xml automatically redirects to sitemap_index.xml, I still manually submitted it to the search engines for peace of mind.

6. Install a 404 logging plugin

After a website redesign, 404 error pages are inevitable. Even without a redesign, logging 404s lets you know which links have become invalid. Therefore, Naiba also installed the following plugin.No more worries about dead links WordPress 404 SEO plugin recommendation: 404 SolutionThis concludes the permalink modification for this blog (I also took the opportunity to modify the homepage description again). Let's continue updating and observe the search engines' reactions.