How to Remove Old Slugs from your Website?

Is your website slow, struggling with broken links, or suffering from a poor SEO ranking? Do you know why?

Over time, your website accumulates old slugs from deleted or updated posts, which can cause issues like broken links, bad SEO ranking, 404 errors, and poor user experience!

First of all, What are old slugs? 

Simply old slugs in your website are the last part of the URL that refers to a specific page. 

When posts are deleted or updated, these old slugs remain on your website, leading to slow performance, and other issues! So What’s the solution? 

These old slugs need to be deleted. The question is how?

If you want to do this manually, it will take a lot of time and effort, this means we need a tool to handle this task efficiently and keep your website running smoothly. So, walk with me to learn how to easily get rid of these annoying slugs!

Let’s get started!

Step1:

• Download The Plugin

To get started you will need to download the “Slugs Manager: Delete Old Permalinks from WordPress Database” plugin that allows you to display or hide specific payment gateways.

 After downloading the plugin, from your WPFactory account, upload it to your WordPress site.

Step2:

• Access The Plugin

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can tailor it to fit your business needs as desired.

To access the plugin: Go to your WordPress dashboard > Tools tab > Slugs Manager.

Step3:

• Remove Selected Old Slugs

This table tells you the slugs on your website that have been changed or updated.👇

This table shows you information for each slug, such as old slug, post ID, post title, post type, and current slug.

You can remove the slug you want or select all the old slugs and remove it. 

From here you can automatically clean up the slugs by scheduling them, every minute, hourly, daily, weekly. Or you can select the second option to clean them up every time you save the post. 

Also, you can regenerate the old slugs from all posts, pages, attachments, or products by title.

Additional Tips

1. SEO Impact:

Old slugs can negatively impact your SEO performance and your site’s ranking. These old slugs lead to 404 errors, broken links, and other malfunctions. Which can reduce the site’s reliability and trustworthiness. When you remove these old slugs, you can enhance your site’s performance and SEO ranking by ensuring that search engines only index the most relevant content. 

2. 301 Redirects

To ensure that your customers reach the right pages and search engines are redirected to new URLs, don’t forget to create 301 redirects, and to prevent any loss in traffic or SEO value.

3. Backup

Before making any changes or removing any old slugs, always ensure to backup your site, to protect your data in case something goes wrong.

4. Routine Maintenance

Always check for any updated URLs and remove old slugs to keep your site clean and ensure it loads quickly.

Final Words

And just like that, you have successfully removed all old slugs from your website with very simple steps in a short time! So don’t let the old slugs down your website.