Migrating Wordpress Permalinks from postname to post_id/postname.

Question

My blog's been up for a year or so, and 90% of our traffic comes from Google, so I want to make sure that I'm handling this permalink change properly. I recently read on Wordpress' codex that including the numerical %post_id% at the beginning of your permalinks can greatly reduce the stress on your database, when a post or page is being fetched. So, I decided to change my permalink structure from /%postname%/ to /%post_id%/postname/.

Now, if I type in, or click on a link to my site in google that looks like this - http://blog.com/cool-post/, it seems to redirect to my new structure: http://blog.com/34424/cool-post/ without a hitch. I'm trying to figure out whether I need to use a 301 redirect plugin or not. I would like to think that search engines like Google will see the same "flawless" redirection that I'm seeing. There doesn't seem to be any broken links. Just looking to confirm that I'll be okay after this change.

Thanks

Answer 1

WordPress handles canonical redirects for you by sending 301 Moved Permanently status codes appropriately. That status code ensures Google will only index your posts by the new URLs (i.e. with the post IDs in your permalinks). I've not used a redirection plugin for a while and my sites have been indexed similarly just fine.