Wordpress - Changing Permalinks & SEO

[gramps]

Anyone using Wordpress will be familiar with Permalinks and their use in optimising SEO, however choosing to change from Default to a different format after the site has been running a while can cause issues, i.e. pages can become 'lost' and the whole site can malfunction.

I have Yoast SEO plugin installed and have attempted to use it but have encountered all of the problems above (had to restore the site from backup to retain sanity!).
I believe the problem surrounds the .htaccess file but am unsure if it is that alone and don't want to break the site again if I can avoid it.

Anyone else here experienced the problems with making Permalink changes after the Wordpress site has been running a while and lived to have a fully operational site after doing it?

If you did, how did you accomplish it?

 

[TopBanana]

I've changed the permalinks in the past. AFAIK it shouldn't create any problems on the site (as everything gets updated with the new style of links), however any existing links to your posts/pages from elsewhere on the internet will no longer work (but can be redirected using htaccess).
I guess that any internal links which you've hardcoded in the text on pages would also need changing or redirecting too.

 

[gramps]

Nobody else had problems and resolved the issue?

 

[OneTen]

I used Permalinks Migration Plugin.

Initially I was having real problems and it was down to my folder struture, I had a legacy Blog folder that was no longer used and this caused issues writing to the .htaccess

 

[wibbly]

Have a look at this.

Maybe this will offer some control over what you want.

 

[gramps]

I used Permalinks Migration Plugin.

Initially I was having real problems and it was down to my folder struture, I had a legacy Blog folder that was no longer used and this caused issues writing to the .htaccess

Have a look at this.

Maybe this will offer some control over what you want.

Thanks, I'll do some reading ... the problem for me was internal linking rather than lost links from search engines, maybe these address this as well.