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I took the big plunge and finally got up enough courage to do what I've been wanting to do for a very long time now ... rename /techtalkforums/ to just /forums/. I've set up 301 redirects and updated my Google sitemap. Is there anything else that I should to to make sure I'm good to go?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by stymiee

Dani AI

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Good move on the rename, — and useful points from and about expectations. For a clean transition on any site, a few practical follow-ups beyond the initial change help avoid surprises and catch edge cases.

Search for hard-coded old-path strings in templates, posts and the database and replace them. Also update canonical and hreflang tags, RSS/atom feeds, any mobile-app deep links, and server or CDN caches so the site consistently serves the new path and host. Example quick checks:

grep -R "old-path" .
# or, for content stored in a DB:
UPDATE posts SET content = REPLACE(content, '/old-path/', '/new-path/') WHERE content LIKE '%/old-path/%';

Monitor and troubleshoot: use Search Console (URL inspection and Coverage reports) and server logs to confirm crawlers are following the new URLs, and watch analytics for unexpected drops or new referral 404s. Spot-test a handful of pages with curl -I https://yourdomain.com/old-path/sample to confirm the redirect header and ensure there are no multi-step redirect chains. Reach out to high-value referrers and update internal links where possible rather than relying solely on external redirects.

Finally, keep an eye on index and crawl reports for several weeks — smaller or less-crawled sites may take longer to stabilise, as mentioned. For official guidance on URL moves, redirects and canonicalisation, see Google’s documentation: Site moves with URL changes, , and MDN’s HTTP 301 status.

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Member Avatar for jbennet

why change it when it worked ? as the old saying goes "if it aint broke dont fix it"

Member Avatar for stymiee

There'll be a hit while Google catches up the the change but that's all you can really do.

Member Avatar for Dani

why change it when it worked ? as the old saying goes "if it aint broke dont fix it"

All the same reasons why we ditched the techtalkforums.com domain name ... too long-winded, etc.

Member Avatar for jbennet

I suppose yeah, it is better.

Member Avatar for Dani

For anyone who is afraid to do this ... it's worth it, don't be scared. Only 8 days later, all of the new URLs are appearing in google's index, and there has been no noticable decrease in traffic. I'm happy :)

Member Avatar for stymiee

I think the speed with which this happened is directly related to the strength of your website. Smaller sites would be looking at a much longer transition period and almost certainly a lapse in the SERPs.

Guess it pays to be big. :)

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