Thanks for the follow up, I’m gonna paste in the last response I had from Xsupport via email as they said to continue the conversation in the forums as opposed to email. Here is the response I received via email
"Hi there,
The access to Cornerstone is now different in new version and instead of >cornerstone=1 mode it is in /x/ URL structure. We had to do this to accommodate new changes which we introduced in Cornerstone version 2+ .
If the permalinks was set to default then setting to post name will not have impact on your previous links. They will redirect to new structure. But if it was set to something other than default it will not.
New forum support is live now. To any follow up questions or new questions, you can ask it in the new forum. "
I still haven’t made any changes yet because I’m trying to fully understand the implications of doing so. From reading that response above it sounds like when I change the default structure over to postname that Wordpress will automatically redirect all incoming links over to the new links with the different name. Is that correct?
From researching online it seems like a lot of the info I can find says it’s a bad idea to change the permalink structure on an existing site, as this will cause the original indexed pages that google had to be demoted. So any pages that had been established over years and were now highly ranking for certain words would end up getting demoted by google due to the permalink structure change. Obviously this is a bad thing I’d like to avoid since those pages have spent years getting to the point they are.
Additionally it sounds like I need to manually go through and install additional plugins and go through each link one by one and create 301 redirects to minimize the impact of the change, and also to prevent them all from going to dead links where people get a 404. Is this correct? I need to go through and add 301s to all of my existing links?
Is it possible to revert to a version of Pre 2.0 Cornerstone so I can retain the ability to edit the site, but can save my self all this extra work and the negative SEO consequences?
Thanks
Just wanted to add a quick note as I’ve been reading and trying to find options for fixes. Looking at Pro it says that the Cornerstone plugin is no longer used, and Pro uses a different built in editor. Would it be possible to change over to Pro from X, and retain the site and default permalink structure I have now?