Internal Links that Automatically Update

I am currently building out a big site with a lot of content right now and am struggling with an aspect of internal linking. I had assumed I'd find lots of people with the same issue, however as I can't easily find a plugin to do what I need, It seems not!

A simple example is with a contact us page. I've given it the URL slug /contact-us/. When I link to this page from elsewhere in the content the link is hard coded into that content.

If I then decide I want to be a little more trendy and change the URL slug for the page to /reach-out/ I am then left with a bunch of 404 errors throughout the site. I understand that I can use a 301 redirect manager to handle part of this which is in place, however it seems pretty poor practice to have links within your own site that are 301 redirected to the correct location.

I don't know if this affects things today, however who knows what will become an issue in the future. One thing is for sure - if this were ever to be looked at, current, correct and valid links will be better than 301 redirects!

What I'd like to be able to do is when inserting a link, have the href of the link stored in the database as [{%page_id%}] (or similar pseudo-code). When the content is pulled from the database the correct URL is then inserted into the HTML that's served to the client.

This would mean that every time the URL slug or page hierarchy is changed, as far as end users (and Search Engines) are concerned the URL will have been updated.

Obviously this won't get rid of 301 redirects completely and if a URL slug is changed the 301 redirect manager will still be required to manage sites linking into this one. It will however ensure all the links on my site are kept up to date.