Not long ago I had a big renovation to do on one of my WordPress sites. Imagine you have a sites with tons of pages and posts, and all of them have a link pointing in the wrong direction. You can of course redirect the link, but since you loose some SEO using Redirect 301, the best is if you can make sure the link point in the right direction from minute 1.
Bulk changing links in WordPress
I had hundreds of links pointing to the following address (just example):
http://test.testdrive.com/
Now, I wanted to change all those links to point to the following address:
I could of course manually change the link at every single page, but that would be a nightmare and take way to much time. So, what did I do to fix the problem?
Bulk changing WordPress text
To fix the problem I used a free WordPress plugin named Search and Replace. It is a very little plugin, though with great power, in fact it can be a bit dangerous if you do some mistakes. But, it is powerful and it gave me a solution which made the entire operation of changing all those link addresses in less than 30 seconds. So, to use this plugin you need to download it and activate it. You can later find it under Tools in WordPress. Take a look at the instructions, and first search for the text you would like to change. If you have done that, and you get it confirmed that it finds the text, then you can go for the big step: Search and Replace.
I made a backup of my WordPress database before doing this, just to make sure that a disaster would not take place in case I made a mistake, or something should happen. I never needed to use that backup, but it felt safe having it in the background.
That was it! It saved me lots of time and also around 50USD, as I almost bought another plugin that was more complicated, but that would still do the work. However, the search and replace plugin turned out to be much more efficient, easy to use and cheaper. So, check it out if you have the same challenge that I had.
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