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How to Change a Blog Post URL in WordPress Without Breaking Your Site

ByNina Clapperton

We’ve all been there: you write a blog post and give it a bad URL.

Maybe it has a date in it from 6 years ago. Maybe it includes a category you no longer have on your site. Maybe it’s 140 characters long.

When I first learned about SEO and did a content audit of my blog, I had to fix over 180 blog posts. Many needed a complete overhaul, including a blog post URL change.

Much like when you move house, you need to move URLs properly. Or you risk wrecking your blog.

Backlinks, internal links, topical authority, and your 0 broken links record are all at risk otherwise.

But it’s not that hard to do it properly – and you don’t need any paid tools!

Two computers in cartoon that say "URL". There is an arrow pointing from the red one to the blue one showing the change of URL.

Step 1: Check if the URL Actually Needs to Change

Before you change your URL, be sure that it’s really the best thing to do.

You shouldn’t change a URL if you can avoid it.

A blog post has history. It’s like living in your family house at one address for years. It’s hard to move and start fresh.

Sure, sometimes it’s a good idea – like if you can’t rank on Google at your current URL – but equally it can be negative – like if you would lose a high quality backlink.

I ask myself a series of questions before choosing to change a URL:

  1. Do the top 10 SERPs have the keyword in the URL and you don’t?
  2. Do you have a date in your URL that makes it look outdated?
  3. Do you have a category in your URL that makes it look outdated or duplicates the URL?
  4. Is your URL as long as War and Peace?
  5. Do you have high quality backlinks to the post that you can’t get changed?
  6. Does the post rank #1?
  7. Can you take a traffic dip right now?

You can click on any of the questions above to get my answer to what I’d do in each scenario.

But essentially, I won’t change a URL if it’s a clean URL with amazing backlinks and it ranks well.

Step 2: Change the URL

Now that you’ve decided you need to change the post URL, you have to actually change it.

Option 1: SEO Plugin

Screenshot of Rank Math in the WordPress post window with the text highlighted in the Permalink field. This shows where a user can edit the SEO title and meta description of a post, as well as editing the URL.

An SEO plugin can change the post URL at the post level.

I’ll use Rank Math for the examples and photos, but it’s the same with Yoast.

  1. Go into the blog post and click on the “Rank Math” view for the right-hand sidebar. It’s the “#/100” button
  2. Click on “Edit Snippet”. It’s a blue button underneath the search engine results preview, but before the “Focus Keyword” section. This will bring up a pop up where you can edit the title, meta description and the slug.
  3. I copy the old URL first and put it in my notes app, or open it in a new tab so I have it saved for Step 3 of this post.
  4. Under the “Permalink” area, change the text to the new slug. You just backspace the old one, and type in the new one.
  5. Update the post to save the new URL.

The moment you update the post, the old URL will become a 404 page.

Option 2: Posts Dashboard

Screenshot of the WordPress "Posts" are of the Dashboard showing the Quick Edit window. It has the Title of a blog post called "When to Change a Blog Post URL: 7 Common Scenarios", the slug (same text), the date, and the category information that a publisher can select. This is where you change the URL of a blog post manually without an SEO plugin.

If you don’t have an SEO plugin or you want another way to change the URL, you can also do this in your WordPress dashboard.

  1. Go to your Posts area of your dashboard where all of the posts are listed.
  2. Hover over the post you want to change and click “Quick Edit”. This will bring up form fields to edit the post, including the title, the URL, and the categories.
  3. I copy the old URL first and put it in my notes app, or open it in a new tab so I have it saved for Step 3 of this post.
  4. Under the “slug” area, backspace the old one and update to the new slug you want for the URL.
  5. Click “Update” to save the URL change.

Note: Both of these methods work for posts or pages on a WordPress blog. It’s the same either way.

Step 3: Redirect the URL

Once you’ve changed the URL, you’ve essentially deleted the old address.

Much like when you move house, you need to forward your mail (aka. your traffic) to your new address. We do this through a redirect.

There are plenty of Redirections plugins. I use the free one inside of Rank Math, but you can really use any of them. They all work the same.

I’ve also used one called “Redirections” and the one inside Link Whisper with the same results.

  1. Copy the old URL from before you changed it.
  2. Use a redirection plugin to point the old URL to the new one. If someone goes to the old URL, they’ll then be sent to the new one.
  3. For the settings, select “301 Permanent Move”.
  4. I recommend using “contains” rather than “exact URL match”. This means it will redirect any variation of the old URL, even if it has a UTM from Facebook or if you forgot the last slash when posting it on social media. So for this post, I wouldn’t put https://sheknowsseo.co/how-to-change-a-blog-post-url/”, I’d put “sheknowsseo.co/how-to-change-a-blog-post-url”.
  5. Save the redirect.
  6. Test the redirect by typing in the old URL, and testing the link somewhere that you previously shared it on socials.

You should redirect a URL if you’ve shared it on socials, if it gets traffic, and if it has some good backlinks but you still decided to change the URL.

Keep the redirect for 6+ months. At the 6 month mark, see how many “hits” it’s gotten. This is the number of times the old URL was accessed, however some of the times will come from something like your Ahrefs Webmaster Tools scan.

You can also use Google Analytics to check the traffic to that specific URL.

I delete the redirects once it’s no longer getting significant hits (you can judge what that number is for yourself. It’ll vary by site and by post).

Step 4: Index the New URL and Update Your Sitemap

You’ve moved house, now you need to update your address on your driver’s license and passport.

There are two ways to do this.

Option 1: Index the New URL

Go to Google Search Console and manually submit the new URL for indexing.

Paste the URL into the top bar, wait for the page to load, then “Request Indexing”.

This will prompt GSC to analyze the page faster.

Option 2: Update Your Sitemap

Option 1 is best practice, even if you’re going to do option 2. This is kind of an “and” option, instead of an “or” option.

You’ve told Google you have a new URL now, but you also need to tell them that the old one doesn’t exist anymore.

Google will figure this out on their own overtime, but you may get a GSC error saying there’s a redirect (that’s ok! There should be a redirect cause you just made it in step 3).

You can get around this by updating your sitemap. I do this option if I’ve changed a few URLs at once.

Using Rank Math, you go through the Setup Wizard again and refresh your connection to GSC.

Otherwise, go to GSC and click on the “Sitemaps” on the left sidebar. Copy and paste the sitemap URL you see there, and resubmit it in the bar along the top.

This will prompt GSC to re-run your sitemap and familiarize itself with your existing URLs.

Your old post URL may continue to rank on Google for months (usually it drops off after a couple weeks at most). This step can help prompt Google to replace it with your new URL faster, but it’s not a miracle cure.

Google works in their own time, so be patient.

Step 5: Check for Broken URLs

This is a crucial step most people skip when they change over a URL.

You need to check for broken links!

Run a broken link audit of your website to find any links to this URL on your site.

Even though you have a redirect in place, you want a direct link within your website. It looks unprofessional to have to redirect people within your own domain.

Set the broken link checker to report “unique instances” of the URL so you can find every page you’ve got it on. Replace it with the new URL.

Common places you’ll find these links include:

  • Silo pages
  • “Read More” or “Related Post” sections
  • Search the keyword of the post on your site, and check for internal links

I also recommend checking for backlinks and alerting the other site owner of the change.

This is easier if you track your guest post, link swaps, and collab posts like I do in this spreadsheet.

I email the person this script:

“Hey [name],

This is [your name] of [your site].

[Explain your connection, like if you did a guest post for them on a certain topic or if you noticed they’re linking to your post organically.]

You link to my post, [blog post URL], in your post, [post name name/URL].

I recently updated the post with a new URL and wanted to ensure you had the most up to date one. Would you mind taking a moment to change the URL to the new one:

[new URL]

Thanks so much!

[Sign off]”

You may not hear back from them, but you might get a response and get the link shifted.

Most bloggers will understand and make the change, but give them time!

Especially us travel bloggers. We go off the grid for months, or just get crazy busy.

Don’t pester them.

Maybe send a follow up in a few months if you haven’t heard back, but don’t stress too much about it.

Conclusion

I recommend updating your content and doing a complete audit at least once a year.

You’ll find posts that aren’t ranking that may need their URLs changed, or you may find posts that you should delete altogether.

When you do those audits, check your redirects to see if you still need to keep any. If they’re no longer getting traffic, cut them loose.

You can get my exact content audit framework here for free.

Read More WordPress Blogging Tips

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Nina Clapperton is the founder of She Knows SEO.

She started blogging in 2018 and spent years doing everything “right” while earning $0. Then she stopped guessing and learned how search actually works. She rebuilt her travel site around audience intent and structure and grew to 50,000 sessions in 6 months. Within a year, the blog was bringing in $30,000 months and later crossed 243,000 pageviews.

She took the same audience first SEO approach and built her education business into multiple $100,000 months.

Now Nina teaches bloggers and online business owners how to build search powered businesses grounded in strong positioning, clear structure, and monetisation that actually supports their audience. She covers traditional SEO and AI driven search without the tech bro noise, and she’s known for explaining complex strategy with analogies you won’t forget.

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