Cleaning Up 64 Files: The Great Slug Migration Story
Just wrapped up one of those satisfying but exhausting refactor sessions where you touch way more files than you initially planned. Started with cleaning up some photo booth URL patterns and ended up rewriting the URL structure across all 13 verticals in my SaaS platform.
The Problem That Started It All
Our photo booth rental sites were stuck with these ugly legacy URLs like glam-photo-booth-rental and wedding-photo-booth-rental. Every time I looked at them, a little part of me died. Clean URLs are just better for SEO, user experience, and developer sanity.
But here's the thing - when you have 13 different business verticals (photo booths, HVAC, gyms, nail salons, etc.) all sharing the same codebase, changing URL patterns becomes a massive undertaking.
The Migration
I bit the bullet and migrated all the photo booth slugs to something actually readable:
glam-photo-booth-rental→glam360-photo-booth-rental→360-videowedding-photo-booth-rental→weddings
You get the idea. Clean, simple, human-friendly.
The real trick was building universal URL helpers that could work across all verticals. Instead of hardcoding URLs everywhere, I created functions like bbs_booth_url() and bbs_service_url() that read patterns from our config and handle fallbacks gracefully.
The Cascade Effect
What I thought would be a quick slug update turned into touching 64 files across two repos. Every header dropdown, every hub page, every cross-link between services had to be updated.
Some highlights from the trenches:
- Fixed barbershop URLs that were using
/barber-at-instead of/barber-near- - Replaced hardcoded service cards in HVAC and roofing sites with dynamic loops
- Updated the sitemap generator and render worker to use the new patterns
The best part? I built in backward compatibility so existing URLs still work while we transition.
The Payoff
Now instead of maintaining URL patterns in 13 different places, everything reads from one config file. Change the pattern once, and it propagates everywhere automatically. That's the kind of DRY principle that makes future-me very happy.
Still need to deploy this beast and create all the new WordPress pages, but the hard part is done. Sometimes the most satisfying work is the boring infrastructure stuff that makes everything else easier down the line.