Remove date structure from blog post URLs to improve memorability and SEO

[choldgraf]

Currently, our blog post URLs follow the pattern /blog/YYYY/slug. I've been reading up a bit about how URL structure impacts readers, and I think this is harming both the referenceability and discoverability of content, and may hurt our search rankings. For example:

1. Users are less likely to click a search result with an old date in the URL (e.g., /2021/...), even if the content is still relevant.
2. If we update old posts with new information (as is a good practice), the year in the URL won't really be useful anymore, or maybe misleading)

I'd like to make a one-time change to our website, so that our URLs for blog posts no longer have the dates hard-coded into them. Here's what I mean:

Current:

https://2i2c.org/blog/2025/cloud-cost-groups/

Proposed:

https://2i2c.org/blog/cloud-cost-groups/

Implementation

To do this, we'd need to:

• Use the slug: metadata in each blog post (this is an annoying Hugo limitation).
  • I propose we enforce this with a lightweight pre-commit-check that runs on new posts.
• Modify Hugo's config to use blog slugs like /blog/:slug
• Generate one-time redirects for all old slugs to new slugs.