Bulk WordPress permalink and slug manager

Changing a URL is only a risk when the old address stops resolving. WordPress already redirects an old post or product path to its new one by itself, so those keep working. What it does not do is redirect an old page path, because a page’s address contains its parents’ slugs — those are the rows in the exported redirect CSV, and they need importing into a redirect plugin.

The practical order is: preview, read the URL change summary, apply, import the redirect file, then test a representative old link. SlugSync will not tell you a change is ‘safe’ — it tells you exactly how many addresses change and how many of them WordPress covers on its own.

Almost always one of three things. WordPress rewrite rules need flushing — open Settings → Permalinks and save once, without changing anything. A caching plugin or CDN is still serving the old routing, so purge it and retest. Or another plugin owns the public URL and is still generating the previous address.

That last case is why SlugSync runs a compatibility preflight before you start: if Permalink Manager, Custom Permalinks, WPML or Polylang is active, it says so up front rather than leaving you to work it out from the 404s afterwards.

For posts and products, WordPress stores the previous slug and redirects the old address automatically — you do not have to do anything. For pages, and for anything else that needs an explicit rule, every applied run exports a two-column CSV of old path and new path, with no header row, in the format the free Redirection plugin imports directly.

SlugSync does not write into another plugin’s redirect tables. It gives you the mapping and leaves the redirect tool to you, so the two never disagree about who owns a rule.

Because slugs must be unique. If the address is already claimed — by existing content, by a reserved WordPress word, or by a date archive — WordPress appends a number rather than refusing to save. Two products both named “Blue Shirt” cannot both be /product/blue-shirt/.

The preview tracks slug claims across the whole run, so a collision between two items in the same batch shows up before you apply rather than as a surprise afterwards. Each adjusted row is labelled with the reason: already used, also proposed in this preview, reserved word, date archive, or altered by another plugin’s slug rule.

Only by hand through Quick Edit, one item at a time, which stops being realistic past a few dozen. The alternative is direct SQL against wp_posts, which skips the uniqueness checks, records no redirects and cannot be undone.

SlugSync builds each slug the way WordPress itself would if the item were saved with an empty slug, in resumable batches, with the old paths recorded as it goes and a full undo for the completed run.

No, and it is worth being direct about that. SlugSync changes slugs, records redirects and reports every change; it does not rewrite links embedded in your post content, menus or widgets.

The changes report gives you every old and new URL pair, which is what a search-and-replace tool needs as input. Old links continue to resolve through the redirects in the meantime, so nothing is broken while you work through them — but a redirected internal link is still a redirected link, and cleaning them up afterwards is the better end state.

Yes, as an optional step. Кофеварка becomes kofevarka rather than a percent-encoded address. Cyrillic and Greek are resolved by a map bundled with the plugin, so the answer does not change between hosts, and Greek follows ELOT 743 — the standard used for Greek passports and road signs — which reads vowel pairs as pairs: Φίλτρου becomes filtrou, not filtroy. PHP’s international text support widens coverage to further scripts where your server provides it, without altering either of those two. When it transliterates Arabic, SlugSync removes apostrophe-like modifier letters before WordPress can leave percent-encoded fragments inside the Latin result.

This is transliteration, not translation: it writes the same sounds in Latin characters, does not attempt English, and sends nothing anywhere. Your visible titles are untouched — only the proposed slug changes.

It depends on how customers search. A SKU that people genuinely look up — a part number, a model reference — earns its place in the address. An internal warehouse code such as 4823-BLK usually just makes the URL harder to read and share.

SlugSync Free lets you go either way: leave the product’s exact assigned SKU out of the slug when it also appears in the title, or add it in when it does not. Either way the visible product title and the stored SKU stay exactly as they are — only the URL is affected.