Hi John,
Yes, you are right in stating that this is the default behaviour of WordPress.
Not to be rude, but of course employees of an SEO company know that a slug shouldn’t be changed without thinking about it. The point is that the average client does not know this. Installing a redirection plugin and teaching the client how to use it could be a solution, but I think it doesn’t make things easier for anyone.
For me the real problem is as described above: it’s a pity that we need to add 5 (!!!) fields to have a fool proof solution for having just a button with:
– an internal/external link
– label text
– option to open in a new browser tab
And as said, the code to implement such a button on the front end is way more complex then it would be when using the ‘link’ field since all the information is in one place and no switches are involved.
The link option combines all these abilities, which is absolutely great. But it misses out in the case a slug is changed, while other fields like the ‘page link’ and ‘post object’ keep working because they use a post ID. I understand that this is the default WordPress implementation, but if that’s not good enough, ACF could consider building it’s own version. But if no one makes notice of the problem, it won’t happen. So that’s why I added my comment here.
On a side note:
I knew that WordPress sometimes redirects old slugs to the new ones, but I didn’t know how it exactly worked. You probably know this, but it might be interesting for other people. Apparently it’s being done by saving old slugs in the post-meta of posts, but only for posts that are non-hierarchical. (see: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_old_slug_redirect/)
