Tool or technique needed

[j_holtslander]

I'm amazed I've never run into this situation before but... a client has put me in the position of needing a way to physically swap 20 pairs of pages in Wordpress without Wordpress updating links to the original destination.

Example

1. About Us 2 (/about-us-2) needs to replace About Us (/about-us).
2. The original About Us should become About Us Old (/about-us-old)

When done, any existing links to /about should not be linking to /about-us-old.

I can't just do a copy/paste swap of the page content because of other aspects of the pages have changed too. eg: Featured images.

---
Me: Why was this done this way? This is why we have development and staging environments.
Account manager: Client did it "to save time" they said.
Me: They didn't.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Never used a tool for that, but if we were to do something similar, we'd make sure any redirection plugin watching URLs is disabled, then just rename the URL slugs from about-us to about-us-old, then rename about-us-2 to about-us. Of course adding in noindex, no archive.

No idea on a tool to do something like that. You MIGHT be able to do something on an SQL level where if it finds "-2" then remove it. Automating that however could be a giant cluster!

 

[j_holtslander]

I ended up doing a manual page-by-page copy/paste over after checking, documenting every other trait of of the pages like sidebar settings, featured images, etc. Took me a good chunk of my day including time spent trying to find another solution. :-/ (sigh)

 

[Conor Treacy]

Yeah, I wouldn't see another way of doing it, while ensuring that it's all accurate. I've spent many hours designing and creating something only to scrap it. It's better to be done correctly in those situations though.