Very old site wanting a revamp - how to handle all the redirects/URL changes

[Greenroads]

Hi all,

I have a very very old site, that requires a facelift (going from an old clunky CMS to wordpress).

A problem I know I am going to face is that this site has a very poor URL structure (www.site.com/section/1/section/ etc) which I plan on cleaning up.

but how do I handle the 100+ backlinks this website has point to such links? If someone could point me in the direction of an article or such that would be great.

Thanks,

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Greenroads

This is a fairly simple thing to do.

1. Go to site:yousiteurl and see how many pages you have in Google - if there are only 100 or so they will all be listed. Put them in to a spreadsheet.

2. Use a backlink checker to identify any other pages that sites may be linking to you from. I use SEMrush but there are plenty of free backlink checkers where you can register and get free info (I just Googled https://monitorbacklinks.com/seo-tools/free-backlink-checker) Note all the backlink destinations.

3. Set up the new site and 301 all the old pages to relevant pages on the new website.There are various plugins that can help or you can edit the htaccess file yourself which is better for site speed. (Generally plugins slow the site)

There are plenty of guides on this but essentially you will just enter lines like this:

Redirect 301 /old page.com/old https://newpage.com/new

The full process is here:

https://wpbuffs.com/301-redirects-wordpress-htaccess/

Regards

Nigel