We are restructuring some URLs are 301 redirects enough to avoid a massive drop in traffic?

Question

My org is rebuilding a very old, very haphazardly built WordPress site and we are thinking about making some changes to our custom post types and therefore the URL structure will change which is going to affect SEO.

So our URLs could change to:

example.org/blog/ => example.org/updates/
example.org/blog/some-post => example.org/updates/some-post

example.org/multimedia/ => example.org/updates/
example.org/multimedia/random-post => example.org/updates/random-post
example.org/multimedia/some-feature/ => example.org/some-feature
example.org/multimedia/some-other-feature/ => example.org/resources/some-other-feature

I would write some 301 redirects for all these things, pointing all blog and multimedia posts to the new URLs and for some specific multimedia posts I would write specific 301 redirects.

But I am in no way an SEO expert so I don't know else I would need to do to avoid a huge drop in traffic. Do I need to mark something in google web master tools or is this the situation where hiring a SEO consultant?

Answer 1

As long as you 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs, and that new structure will be in place for all newly created custom post types moving forward, you will be fine. This is a standard best practice.

Please also make sure that your sitemap(s) are updated accordingly.

The only other thing I can think of is to make sure that https (TLS aka SSL) is implemented properly so you don't end up with something like this:

https://example.com/post-a -> https://example.com/post-b (301)

http://example.com/post-a (200)

You may see a slight dip/drop in impressions or average position as Google officially re-indexes the pages, but you'll see it go back to normal within a day or so, but users probably won't experience a difference.