Changing url structure

[LadyApollo]

We are an ecommerce site established in 2005 and currently have some great rankings.

We are about to move away from our existing platform, actinic and move on to Magento. This will change all our url's.

What are the steps we should be asking our web developers to follow in order to minimize the consequences of moving?

Thank you.

[JamesNorquay]

I would map out the current urls which are ranking and generating revenue, then 301 redirect these old URL's to the new URLS you will have.

It is not going to be easy but and it is evident that their may be a loss in ranking when the change over process happens.

[RyanKent]

If you are going to change URLs, there are two preferences:

1. To change URLs in such a manner that your URLs can map from the old URLs to the new ones in as few rules as possible. If you have 5000 URLs, you would strongly prefer not to write 5000 rules. Ideally you create some logic to map the old URLs to the new ones. For example:

Old URL: mysite.com/category/product-id/product-name

New URL: mysite.com/product-name

A single rule can be written to transform the old URL to the new one.

2. You want your new URLs to be "future-proof". We know that technology changes so remove any .html, .php or other extension from the end of the URL. They are not helpful to users and will cause a redirect to be needed any time technologies change. GOOD URL: mysite.com/product, BAD URL: mysite.com/product.html

Also take some time to really think about your URL structure. Anything that changes over time should ideally be removed from the URL structure.

[LadyApollo]

Thank you for your advice.

The url structure is not that straightforward to be able to write a rule - which is unfortunate.

How many redirects would you think to be acceptable as we have a vast product range?

[RyanKent]

There is not any "acceptable" number. You would write the minimum number of rules possible. That number can range from 1 to the total number of pages you currently have on your old site.