Enough reading about it, and quaking in fear at the thought of doing it. It was time to give my old permalinks the boot.

Months ago (when I first grasped that I absolutely had to change my permalink structure in order to boost traffic) I read through the instructions for a plugin that would make this a painless transition. In other words, no loss of traffic or “site not found” errors.

Dean Lee, who developed the permalink migration plugin says, “With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings . . . This plugin will generates a ’301 Redirect’ when user or spider visit your site through old permalinks,and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post.”

And even though I believed Dean, because his plugin is touted all over the internet, I shook my head and walked away from the task. For non programmers like me, going under the hood is always scary.

Time passed, though, and with a few more prompts from the illustrious lineup of blogging blogs I read regularly, I realized I had to go for it.

Thinking a little sideways, I bought some new hiking boots because the old ones were way past their prime, and that seemed to be just the nudge I needed.

Took old Chester for a short hike, rolled up my sleeves and installed the plugin.

My change sequence went like this:

1. Visit Dean’s site to get the plugin.

2. Read all the discussion in the comments following Dean’s instructions.
3. Get confused again.
4. Take Chester for another hike, and shake off my anxieties.
5. Go into the admin panel to update my permalink structure.
6. Get confused again.
7. Hop to Codex and the WordPress Support area to look up the proper syntax for my NEW permalinks and insert the format I choose on that page.
8. Activate Dean’s plugin and tell it what I want it to do.
9. Freak out when I see the instructions for creating and uploading a .htaccess file.
10. Return to the Codex and WP Support to read how to do that.
11. Do it.
12. Boom goes the dynamite: I am in business (I thought).

Told one of my bloggy friends what I had done and she told me I might not have done it precisely correctly, since all my urls contained double urls. So, I had to make one more modification and it looks like it’s all working now.

I may not have selected the best format for my permalinks yet, but at least now they are all category and title based, rather than digits.

Total time elapsed on this: about a hour. That does not include the months of worrying about it or the time spent walking the dog.

I learned a lot, and that, my friends, goes to show that you can do it, too!

If you’re stuck, do something unrelated or sideways to the problem to get yourself unstuck and go for it.