WordPress Plugin: Better Search and Replace by Delicious Brains

I want to take some time to point out some of the plugins that I have installed on my blog and used as part of migration from Blogger to WordPress. In my post Online Broken Link Checker Tool for SEO article, I mentioned how to track down broken links. Well once you have them, you can go to the pages and manually change them, or if possible you can change them en masse. This is particularly true if a site changes from something like example.com/abc/test to example.com/test. The links will work if you just remove the abc part of the URI. I encountered a lot of these for changes done at Informationweek and some of the other news media outlets. This is one of those cases where they didn’t follow good practices with regards to permalinks.

The Better Search and Replace plugin met my needs by allowing me to make changes to the saved posts by changing the URIs to match the new path to the resources. There is a pay version of the tool, but I didn’t require it.

A Word of Caution: Before you take any action to alter your database, remember to back it up. This tool is directly manipulating data in your database. Also, make sure you perform a dry-run and examine the results.