Redirecting URLs when switching over from Volusion

Question

We have a site which we are switching over from Volusion to Magento.

This site has around 1500 products, and the url's for each of these product pages is going to be different from the current url on Magento. (The Volusion url's are extremely ugly. The Magento ones will just be site.com/product-name)

I want to 301 redirect the old urls to the new ones so we keep our search engine rankings.

Is there a better way to do this than to manually go one by one, and lining up all of the old urls with the new ones? Doing this will take hours and hours, and I'm looking for a faster solution.

Answer 1

Assuming that your product SKUs are consistent between Volusion and Magento then this is easily scripted or manipulated in Excel.

To do this in Excel: First export the product SKUs and URLs from Volusion into a CSV, then export the product SKUs and URLs from Magento into a CSC. You can then quite easily create a third CSV file in Excel that contains the following columns:

SKU,Old URL,New URL
MYSKU,http://domain.com/old_productUrl,http://domain.com/nice-new-product-url
MYSKU2,http://domain.com/old_productUrl2,http://domain.com/nice-new-product-url-2

Once you have this CSV file I highly recommend using Optimise Web's Mass 301 Redirect extension. This will allow you to manage the 301 redirects using a CSV file (read the docs to ensure the format is correct).

I do NOT recommend manually creating redirects in the Magento "URL Rewrite Management" screen. Mostly because they're hard to manage in there, but also because if you ever need to purge that data (it happens) then you'll lose any manually added entries when you re-index.