Editing 101

An Editors Best Practice: Always Work From A Backup

Important!

Duplicating Pages and Posts
Making a quick text edit is one thing, but if you are changing the layout, adding photos or replacing large blocks of text it is best to work from a draft backup. You never know how your edits will effect the layout, or if you inadvertently push the wrong button, or simply don’t have time to complete your update. Don’t leave yourself or your visitors in the lurch with a tweaked and partially updated page.
  • Duplicate A Page/Post for editing
    • Simply go to the Pages or Posts section of the WordPress dashboard.
      • Scroll to, or ‘Search’, for the page you wish to edit.
      •  Hover over the page title and select ‘Duplicate This’.
      • A second page will appear in the list with the same title as the original and the word ‘draft’ appended to the end: ‘My Old Page – Draft’

Understanding Page Paths & Slugs:

The slug is the part of the the url that references that page or post specifically. It follows a slash after the .com (or pertinent suffix) of the primary domain. You can see the slug of any published page by going to Dashboard –> Pages, hovering on a page title and selecting ‘Quick Edit’ (the same with Posts).

The slug is automatically generated when you first publish a page. A slug will not be generated as long as the page remains a draft. If you return a published page to draft mode it will retain the slug it had. When a page is published, the slug that is automatically generated simply uses the words you put in the page title and adds dashes between each word. Your primary domain is ‘truformtiny.com’. If you publish a page titled ‘My New Page’ the url will be: ‘truform.com/my-new-page’. The slug is ‘my-new-page’.

If you duplicate a published page and then publish it, it will carry over the established slug and then add a numeric qualifier on the end: the duplicate of ‘Previously Published Page’ would become ‘previously-published-page-2’. If you duplicate and publish that page again, the slug would be ‘previously-published-page-3’, etc.

This lesson is extremely important for SEO purposes, and maintaining consistent navigation on your website:

After editing a draft and publishing it you want the new page to replace the pre-existant page. The slug tells the WordPress navigation system and the search engines (Google/Yahoo/Bing) where the page resides. That means your newly edited and published page must replace the original entirely. If you want to save the original page for future reference you must rename the slug; for example ‘previously-published-page-original’ (or you can delete the page entirely). Then you must edit the slug of the newly updated page from ‘previously-published-page-2’ to ‘previously-published-page’. If you fail to make this critical change your visitors may fail to find your new page, and Google will not pass on any established SEO power to that page. In fact, your new page will cannibilize the old page and each page will lose SEO power. Furthermore, Google will start to dock your site entirely for having a graveyard of pages it can no longer find.