What Happens If I Change The Slug On An Old Blog Post?

An article I posted recently has a bit of a trouble. The commodity is titled What Influenced Your Blogging Platform Option.

Now, take your mouse and move it over the link. If you have your status bar enabled on your browser, you will run across the following URL in the condition bar:

https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/06/xiv/what-commodity-influenced-your-blogging-platform-pick/

It should exist:

https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/what-influenced-your-blogging-platform-choice/

When y'all write a title in the Write Post panel of WordPress, and you are using permalinks, which is the default on WordPress.com blogs and an option for total version WordPress blogs, WordPress turns the title into the link to your post.

At the last minute, I inverse the championship from "What Article Influenced Your Blogging Platform Choice" to "What Influenced Your Blogging Platform Option". I forgot to do function two of what it takes to change a title on a published postal service in WordPress.

Paying Attention to Your Post Slug and Title

When you lot are working on a mail in draft fashion, the URL of the post is not created. It is created when you publish the post. When you hit the Publish button, WordPress takes the title of the mail and cleans information technology up and turns it into part of the post accost or URL.

Allow'due south say that this is the championship of your post:

It's Sadie's Solar day for preparin' for Nancy'due south Visit - I promise!

Later on hit the Publish button, WordPress would clean it up and turn information technology into this:

example.com/2006/6/5/its-sadies-day-for-preparin-for-nancys-visit-I-hope

WordPress cleans up the title by removing apostrophes, quote marks, and other characters which tin do bad things to a link if left in.

This might non exist what you desire every bit the permalink URL. You might want to change it. You could add a "chiliad" to "preparin" or exercise something even more drastic.

WordPress Post Slug on the Write Post Panel The Mail Slug is located in the correct sidebar of WordPress. If the section isn't open up, click the plus symbol to expand it. To alter your Post Slug, only type in the new title or URL with dashes in between each give-and-take, no spaces. An extreme fixed version of this example might exist:

example.com/2006/6/v/sadies-solar day-nancys-visit

The Mail Slug does not take to be the title. Y'all could modify it to "the-terrible-day" or whatever you want. Just remember, it only appears after you lot've hitting the Publish button, so you will have to edit the mail service after its been published. Which was the cause of my fault.

The pull a fast one on to changing your permalink URL is to set the Mail Timestamp to a future appointment or fourth dimension before you lot hit PUBLISH. This way, the mail is published just "not nevertheless". Information technology's held in the cue for posting when that date and fourth dimension comes. Since it isn't out in public eye, you can edit the post and change the Post Slug to whatever you desire. You can set the fourth dimension for ten minutes ahead or three weeks. Any y'all demand to make the change to the Post Slug.

In my faulty Post Slug case, because future posts are still non working on WordPress.com blogs, I have to click Edit, then SAVE afterwards the publish time and engagement in order for them to mail service. I did this and at the last minute, I took the word "Article" out of the title, then hitting SAVE and headed out the door.

Ii days later, after people have linked to the post and left comments on information technology, I realize that the permalink URL is different from the title. If I change information technology, it will break links all over the place. So what should I do? Let's look at my choices, and yours, when it comes to irresolute a permalink post slug.

Change the Post Slug, which will change the URL, which will intermission links to the article. I can either trust others to detect the cleaved link (ha!) or notify everyone I find in the trackbacks and incoming links list that I've changed the URL. However, this is fourth dimension consuming and reliant upon others to fix their links. And how tin can I always find all the links to the post that might come from non-trackback powered sites?
Change the Postal service Slug and add a ReDirect to my .htaccess file. This is probably the best all effectually solution. I can set up a ReDirect lawmaking in my .htaccess file in the root directory which volition redirect the incoming "incorrect" link to the correct "new" link and no one would notice. I would do this on my total WordPress site and not call back about it, but on WordPress.com, I don't have any access to my files, root directory, or annihilation under the hood. And so this isn't an option for this blog.
Get out it alone. This is probably the best answer, as information technology doesn't really affair what the URL is as long as it gets to the post. It does, notwithstanding, thing what the title is representative of the article and helps readers sympathize what the post is about.

Me? I cull to leave it alone and apply information technology as a lesson to everyone to be careful when messing with Post Slugs and remember the 2 step solution to fixing them. And let this article serve as a reminder to myself not to mess around with my Post Slugs. 😉

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