Add ability to define page redirects in Matomo for when you change page urls so you can still analyse data for redirected pages #19117
Labels
Enhancement
For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc.
Milestone
Not sure if there's already an issue for it, couldn't find one immediately.
Every website will eventually change some page URLs and define redirects for the old urls to redirect to the new urls.
Similarly, it would be great if we could define which pages are redirected in Matomo to be able to analyse historical data for redirected pages.
Example use case:
We recently built a new knowledge base and as a result, say 50 page urls changed.
For example https://matomo.org/docs/installation/ changed to https://matomo.org/faq/on-premise/installing-matomo/
The problem is that now we no longer have historical data for this new page https://matomo.org/faq/on-premise/installing-matomo/ as all the previous data is under https://matomo.org/docs/installation/ . This makes it nearly impossible to see if anything changed and whether we are now getting more or less traffic and the same for all other metrics.
Since this is a common task many websites go through, this can be quite valuable. If key pages are changed (like a few in our cases), then renaming page urls effectively removes a big chunk of the so valuable historical data.
Because we would lose historical data when we redirect pages, we sometimes even decided to not change the page urls to not lose historical data meaning Matomo prevented us from making good changes to our urls.
Expected
Have the ability to define URL mappings when you redirect URLs. Eg we would define
https://matomo.org/docs/installation/ --> https://matomo.org/faq/on-premise/installing-matomo/
and then Matomo would show previous/docs/installation/
data under/faq/on-premise/installing-matomo/
(we have aGroupBy
data table filter for this for example) .Similar feature could exist for page titles when someone changes the page title.
A first version wouldn't need to support regexes from my perspective. A simple source and target would be good enough.
Workaround
Sometimes it works to look at the page titles report as these still show the same data as before (assuming page titles weren't renamed). But this doesn't always work and they don't always show the same kind of information.
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