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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:36:18+00:00

Background: We are migrating a website hosted on a dot net based custom CMS

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Background: We are migrating a website hosted on a dot net based custom CMS to WordPress.

The Problem: The content in the various posts contains links to other content in the CMS. These links have been put in manually and contain the entire URL starting from http. While we have moved all the post contents to WordPress using a php script, the links within the content still point to the old links. Since the URL structure has changed there does not seem to be a programmatic way of replacing the links.

Example of the old url: http://www.example.com/doing-this-and-that-1234.aspx

Example of the new url: http://www.example.com/categoryname/doing-this-and-that/

Request: I need ideas on how can we handle this without needing to change all links manually.

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m doing something similar at the moment, migrating a huge static html store to on run on django (it’s painful and bloody).

    Our solution isn’t anything particularly elegant. During migration of each page, we are noting the old url, then the new url, and add them to a redirect database. Once we’ve migrated all of our content to the new backend and url structure, we’re running a script that will identify all links in the document with these xpath selectors:

     //a/@href
 //img/@src

    Next we pull up the redirects from our redirect table and replace the links with the regexes below.

    #escape special characters to avoid problems with the regex
link = link.replace('#', r'\#')
link = link.replace('.', r'\.')
link = link.replace('/', r'\/')
link = link.replace(':', r'\:')

#compile a regex, using the source link, and replace all existing links
repl_regex = r'href\s{0,}\=[\s\"\']{0,}(%s)[\s\"\']{0,}'%link
markup = re.sub(repl_regex, 'href="%s"'%dst_url, markup)

#repeat for images
repl_regex = r'src\s{0,}\=[\s\"\']{0,}(%s)[\s\"\']{0,}'%link
markup = re.sub(repl_regex, 'src="%s"'%dst_url, markup)

#Let me know if you have any questions, the above is written in python
#and it sounds like you're using php and a .net language.

    Now while this method is probably more work than you’d like, and will require a little more upfront preparation, it has two advantages:

    1) By comparing every link in a document to a redirect table, you will be able to more easily identify missing pages / missing redirects

    2) SEO. Instead of making the googlebot recrawl your entire site, simply provide 301 redirects against your redirect table

    Let me know if you have any questions.

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