Converting info site to ecommerce site (Questions)

[Ebuzz]

I was wondering if anyone has any experience in this regard.

I have an old site that is a fully info-content site and makes a bit of money from Adsense and Amazon Associates. It is a WordPress site, and has a permalink structure of: - domain.com/category/post-name/.

The site was made back in 2007 when people hardly knew of WordPress and the shortest permalink structure of: - domain.com/post-name/ was not yet popular (Everyone uses this nowadays).

I want to remove or do away with the /category/ inside the permalinks, without affecting the current SERP rankings of the site. What's the best way to go about this change? I would have to change the way the permalinks operate inside my WordPress admin itself....

After this switch is done, I want to convert the site into an ecommerce store selling hard products. This means I have to move the content from the main domain into a smaller directory, say /blog/.....and reserve the root domain for the store itself. I am thinking of using Shopify for the main store.

Any tips or pointers on how to go about this? It seems like things could go wrong along the way, or the changeover may take a while to fully realize (in Google).

[martinibuster]

You can remove the category base URL with the Yoast SEO plugin by going to Advanced tab and fiddling around in the Permalinks section. You can also download a plugin [wordpress.org] that accomplishes the same thing. Both will redirect the old URLs to the new and improved URLs.

[Ebuzz]

@ Martinibuster

Thanks for the tip on using those plugins. What I am going to do is change the way the permalinks are constructed at the base level within WordPress admin. Would you suggest activating those plugins before or after the change? Because all the post and page URLs will all cease to exist after I change the permalink structure and essentially become 404s after this.

[bwnbwn]

They can all be 301'd to the correct url having them go 404 would be a bad move.

[not2easy]

Don't change the URL structure until you move the old content to its new URLs. Then you can use a plugin to redirect. After you change the URL structure, the posts/pages don't go away until you physically delete (or hide) them. If you change the URL structure in Admin > Settings now, the old content will just have new permalink URLs without /category/.

The way WP works, you can reach the same content at multiple URLs so the old URLs would still go to the same content but in menus and links they would be seen without the /category/. Since they were indexed under the old structure and they will still exist, you would need to redirect those old URLs.

If the new directory will be part of the same WP install, it is fairly basic for 301 rewrites internally via plugin. If they will change format (to static html pages for example) then your rewrite should be in htaccess. If you use htaccess for 301 rewriting, you will need to be sure not to use those /category/ names in your new URLs.

[Ebuzz]

Basically, should I

1) activate the redirect plugin first and then change the Permalink structure....

2) change the Permalink structure and then activate the redirect plugin

Which one comes first?

[bwnbwn]

1- if you know the url structure be sure and check to make sure the plugin works correctly and the urls are indeed 301's to the correct old url.