There are a number of reasons you might want to rename pages on your Weebly website. It could be because one or two of your services have changed, a page name such as “Portfolio” now has to be “Completed Projects”.
In the case of above example, the URL which for example was example.com/portfolio would become example.com/completed-projects. Where “example.com” refers to your website domain.
If you’re building your own Weebly website whether as expert or as a beginner then you already know how to create a page and give that page a name. You also know that you can rename that page anytime by going to the PAGES tab.
The question however is, how do you rename weebly page and keep existing (already published) URL? and why is this necessary? In this article I’m going to explain how to change names of your Weebly website pages without affecting the URL slug.
Why do I need to worry about keeping existing page URL slug when renaming page name?”
The popular answer is… for SEO reasons. If your website has been published for a while and the pages have been indexed by search engines, renaming a page URL without a redirect (as a fix) will be seen as an error and will affect your SEO goals.
If however, you’re not concerned with SEO then you can go ahead and change the page names without a fix for the URL slug. But you should consider a second reason below.
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Another reason to consider changing page name and keeping the URL is the issue of dead/broken links. Weebly website has a default 404 page, also known as “Page Not Found”.
By default, your website users/visitors are redirected to this page when they follow up a link to a page on your website that’s no longer available either because you deleted that page or renamed the page. Keeping previous URL slug or redirecting it to another page helps avoid the “404 – Page Not Found” scenario.
How do I change Weebly Page And Keep Existing/Previous URL?
You can do this before changing the page name, while changing the page name or afterwards.
- On your Weebly website editor click PAGES,
- from the list of pages, click the page you wish to change its name,
- click SEO Settings,
- within Page Permalink editor field, type in current or previous URL slug (see below examples)
That’s how you change a Weebly page name and keep existing URL slug.
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Examples: How to type in the URL (best practices)
This section is not really necessary if your URL slug is just one word such as portfolio, or services, or FAQs, or testimonials or blog, etc. then all you have to do is type in that one word.
But if the URL slug you’re looking to keep is multiple words slug, then you must add hyphen (dash) between each word without any space.
For example, let’s say that your page name currently is (or recently was) Accounting Services and you wish to change it to just “Services”. In this case the URL slug would have been example.com/accounting-services which means after changing the page name from Accounting Services to just Services, you also need to type in accounting–services in Permalink field so that the page “Services” will always be available via old link as example.com/accounting-services.
If it’s 3 words such as Services We Offer, then you’ll need to type in services-we-offer. Each word is separated by a dash with no spaces in between.
A one word example is example.com/services, no spaces and no dash.