I can read a lot of questions about this topic but with different interpretations. I'm going to change my permalink structure
from
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /%postname%/
So new posts will be natively in the new url format, about old posts I'm going to add just one row in the .htaccess file, following the suggestion coming from yoast
RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(?!page/)(.+)$ /$4
After few test in another small website, it seems to work.
My questions are:
Is finally the "best way" to do it in terms of avoiding SEO impact? (I see a lot of people using redirect plugin..someone says that wordpress does it automatically after structure changes..someone add in htaccess one row for each link even if the structure is standard..)
About sitemap.xml, I'm using a plugin to generate it, so basically after changing permalink structure also the sitemap content (just for the post) will be completely updated. So in theory as soon as the sitemap will be processed by Gooogle, Google will see a new set of url. Could it affect current post google ranks? Any suggestions?
Sorry if there are similar question, but as you can imagine it would be very risk change. Thanks!!!