The Dangers of Changing Your Website’s URLs

Don’t change the slugs or the URL of your website frequently.

Finally, as we learn more about websites and our user experience, many people feel tempted to just change the slug of their pages.

But this is generally a bad idea if done without some consideration.

For example, what happens if a user has created the habit of visiting the old URL? They will hit a 404 error page. For this, you need to redirect users from the previous URL to the new one.

It’s important to change any internal links to point to this new URL.

If your goal is to also rank well on search engines, you have to make Google’s life easier by updating your internal links. 

Always track your 404 errors and your redirects. This is a more intermediate topic, but you need to keep it in mind: don’t change your URLs unless necessary.

Now let’s just check your understanding of this lesson.