Introducing Dynamic Links to prevent broken URLs
New in Prepr
This month we have a big update for you. This feature has been requested by a lot of editors and now we are happy to announce the release. Let's dive in and see what this means for you and your team.
Problem: Broken links when changes occur
When you manage content in a content management system you often use links to point to other pages. Until now you had to use static links (e.g. https://xyz.com/some-page). But what if the URL of a page changes? Then a dead link appears on your website. I'll show you a few more situations that cause dead links.
Last-minute URL changes
The moment before you want to put a page, product, or article online you realize that you have changed the title and therefore the slug of your URL, because of a recent A/B-test you did. Now you have to check where you have applied the URL and replace the wrong URL with the right one.
Site structure changes
Let's say we want to change the URL structure of our website and change prepr.io/blog/ to prepr.io/news. In that case, you'll have to edit all the existing links to your blog articles by hand.
URL changes for SEO
Let's say your SEO team comes up with an extra keyword for a title, or they optimize SEO by internally linking valuable pages to each other. And a title of a page gets changed...
You don't want that, but detecting and fixing broken links is a tedious and time-consuming process. But, we've come up with a solution for this.
Solution: Dynamic Links
This is where Dynamic Links come in. It allows you to link to content items or assets with a dynamic link that stays in sync with the title or slug. The link is automatically updated when the title, slug, or URL changes. This way the link stays intact when you move or rename content, and you don't have to enter a hard URL anymore. With Dynamic Links, your URLs will always be correct! Isn't that convenient?
Here's how it works
- Select the text for the link in the editor
- Click on 'insert item link'
- Select the content item or asset in the media browser and insert the link.
That's all. From now on you will always get the correct URL. This prevents you from spending all that extra time replacing broken links that you have used in many places.