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Sites URL Naming: Best Practices
Mindy Worley avatar
Written by Mindy Worley
Updated over a week ago

When migrating from another website builder to BoxCast Sites, it's important that your page URLs match as closely as possible to your original page URLs. If you don't match up the URLs to the pages correctly when moving from your existing site, your visitors may run into issues with cached search results.
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If you make sure to match the URLs going from the old site to the new site, the search engine results that may be cached should still show the new page when clicked. However, if they are different, the searcher may get a 404 error.
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Example: I'm a user and my current site domain/home URL is mysite.org. My current giving page is mysite.org/donations. I want to migrate to BoxCast Sites. The template I chose has a donations page, but its URL slug is /giving. Perhaps I don't change that, maybe because I don't realize that I can, or maybe I think it doesn't matter. I finish building my site and hit publish; the site is now live.
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When someone searches for my donation page after the change, the search engine they are using may still have the page cached as mysite.org/donations. This throws a 404 error, since that page no longer exists on that domain. The current domain would actually be mysite.org/giving instead.


This can be adjusted by doing domain redirects, but the simplest solution is trying to match your current site URL slugs as closely as possible.

Note: This doesn't work for every situation. If your current site has .htm or .html at the end of the URL, users will still experience the 404 error on search results since we don't append .htm or .html on the end of our URLs. In those cases, setting up 301 redirects is the best option.
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