Changing Titles in the Titles of WordPress Posts

Damn, damn, damn. I found some posts I wrote before I found Spellbound Online Spell Checker which puts built-in spell checking in Firefox. The word “perseverance” was misspelled in the title. ARGH!

So I had to go back and change the spelling. I quickly learned there is more to fixing or changing a title in a WordPress blog than just fixing the title.

How to Change or Fix Titles in the Titles of WordPress Posts

If you want or need to make a change in the title of a WordPress post, there are several steps to the process.

1. Find the post with the error in the the title in Manage > Posts and click EDIT.
2. In the Title form area, make the changes.

   

3. Move to the right column to your Post slug section. This is the phrase that appears in your posts URL if you are using permalinks, the default URL structure for many WordPress blogs. If the Post slug section is closed, click on the + (plus) symbol to open the section. The post slug or permalink is a cleaned up version of your post title. Carefully make the appropriate changes in the Post slug form, keeping dashes (hyphens) in between each word, no spaces.
4. If the error is also in the post section, such as a misspelling, click in the Post textarea box and do one of the two options:
   1. Manually or using an online spell checker like Spellbound, fix the post content from within the Post textarea.
   2. Use a Text Editor to fix the problem in the content.
      1. Select the whole text (Ctrl+A) and copy it (Ctrl+C).
      2. Paste the text (Ctrl+V) into a text editor, not word processing program. Do a search and replace or manually fix the problem text.
      3. Select the repaired content and copy and paste it back into the Post textarea.
5. Check you’ve fixed everything and then click SAVE or Save and Continue Editing to verify your changes.

The link is changed and the title is changed, and any problems in the post content is fixed, but we still have a problem. Links to that specific post have now changed because you changed the URL address.

For the most part, WordPress can automatically handle the change in the title, though not always. If it doesn’t you have some options if you are using the full version of WordPress. Some of these will also work with WordPress.com blogs.

1. Search your blog for references to the link and manually change them. Look in your site map, links list, and referring posts.
2. Look for incoming links to that post and notify these people that the link has changed.
3. Create a redirect in your .htaccess file.
4. Do a search and replace throughout your database to change the link reference. Do this with extreme caution.

And the lesson learned here? Check the spelling and get it right before you hit the Publish button. 😉

Related Articles

• Search and Replace in WordPress MySQL Database
• Getting Under the Skin of the htaccess File
• The Power of the Link
• Those Pesky 404 Page Not Found Errors
• Blog Maintenance – Check For 404 Page Not Found Errors

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen