Hi Peter,
We migrated from Visualsoft to Woocommerce approx. 10 days ago and are experiencing 404 errors. Please see a couple of examples below –https://furnituredirect.co.uk/contact-us-i3
https://furnituredirect.co.uk/hollywood-station-pro-white-p578
How do we quickly resolve this?
Many thanks.
Thanks for contacting me.
I assume what happened was in the move, the structure of your old URLs wasn’t duplicated on the new site.
When I look at those URLs you’ve sent through, and compare them to the new examples – there doesn’t seem to be some simple rule that could be written to resolve that.
What I mean by that is sometimes if a company changes systems, it’s as simple as the old URL looking like:
https://furnituredirect.co.uk/shop/hollywood-station-pro-white/
and the new one:
https://furnituredirect.co.uk/product/hollywood-station-pro-white/
in which case it’s easy enough to write a rules that says:
/shop/
has changed to:
/product/
But your site looks much more complex – every old URL has seemingly random characters and numbers at the end of it (which is probably some internal Visualsoft ID).
The correct approach is to make sure all the old URLs have proper 301 redirects in place to forward them to the new URL. In your case I think that would be a matter of manually mapping each one. Creating a spreadsheet of all the old URLs (which you’d need to either glean from an old sitemap file, or perhaps searching for your domain in Google and copying/pasting all the old URLs they’re showing) in one column, with the equivalent new URL next to it.
Then that could be used to create the forwarding rules.
The quick way is to install a plugin to forward all 404s to the homepage. The downside is you’d lose much of the SEO authority the site had previously I’m afraid.
With any site move, ideally this would be a major part of the migration plan ahead of time. Doing it after the fact is always a bit stressful, and less than ideal from an SEO standpoint too.
I hope that helps – and sorry there’s no perfect quick fix!
Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert
