How to move away from sticky links plugin properly

This is the technical support forum for WPML - the multilingual WordPress plugin.

Everyone can read, but only WPML clients can post here. WPML team is replying on the forum 6 days per week, 22 hours per day.

Tagged: Action needed - Documentation

This topic contains 3 replies, has 3 voices.

Last updated by Nigel 10 months, 4 weeks ago.

Assisted by: Nigel.

Author	Posts
February 5, 2024 at 9:41 am #15265019
emelieC	Hello! I have quite a few websites where I used sticky links. The situation looks like in the attached image, where I have links converted to sticky. See the uploaded image. 1. I see that you have discontinued the plugin, so I wonder which steps I need to take in order to remove the plugin. 2. Should I first revert the sticky links before removing the plugin? 3. Is there another way to use the functionality? 4. What is best practice, especially regarding SEO? 5. Something else I should think of? Thanks!
February 5, 2024 at 2:02 pm #15266495
Alejandro Supporter Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) Italian (Italiano ) Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)	Hello! I'll help you get started while a supporter takes your case. We haven't really discontinued the plugin but it's a plugin that is hardly needed anymore so it's very likely you won't need it now. If you want to remove the plugin, you can first revert the changes, yes, from the same page you showed us on the screenshots attached by you. then you can disable the plugin and delete it 🙂 Regards
February 6, 2024 at 11:38 pm #15274168
emelieC	What was the reason for having that? I could never really wrap my head around it. I guess my wishful thinking was telling me that the plugin made the link into a shorter version using the page ID instead of the actual URL then using the lang tag information of the current page to know which translation of the linked page it should show when opened. This in my mind solved the problem of having to translate links when making translations. If this is true, I would probably have to do a lot of link translations after removing the sticky links. Was I right in my thinking?
February 7, 2024 at 9:49 am #15275729
Nigel Supporter Timezone: Europe/Madrid (GMT+01:00)	Hi there Let me take over here. I've been with OnTheGoSystems for nearly 8 years and Sticky Links pre-dates me, and I can't speak to the reasoning behind its initial implementation. You are accurate in describing how it works, and it's also true to say that it is typically no longer needed. WPML itself evolved to get much better at handling links, making the add-on largely redundant. When translating content with WPML internal links (to pages within the same site) are handled automatically so that they point to the correct language. If you have content that is already translated containing links that may not be updated to point to the correct language (which may be the case if you are removing Sticky Links from your site) then you can run the batch process at WPML > Settings > Translate Link Targets to update such links.