Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing a new page on your WordPress website, the following happened … all from your post URL:

• Potential visitors to your site could easily tell what the post was about,
• Search engines would easily find your page and correctly index the content to improve your search results,
• Every single content item added to your site would have its own unique identifier, making your site easier to manage.

Well, this is what permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to an individual post, category, or other taxonomy (a way to organize things together) like archives.

A permalink is the web address that others will use to link to your posts or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to articles on your site. Some people also call permalinks “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the URL pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a permalink.

Why Use Permalinks?

Hopefully, you are probably aware by now that, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems you can use when it comes to publishing search optimized content.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but there are excellent SEO plugins you can use that will help to finetune its SEO aspect.

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your website, then you cannot ignore the importance of its site’s URLs. Search engines like Google place considerable weight on the URL structure of a site.

Permalinks can be used to make the links on your site into “prettier” and more “search engine friendly” URLs. Permalinks are also used to improve the usability, aesthetics, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Now … let’s review why you may need to use permalinks if publishing content in WordPress.

By default, a WordPress installation uses a URL-naming structure for your posts that isn’t very search engine friendly and looks like this …

WordPress uses the link with a string query shown above to find data within its database. It does not mean much to anyone, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot taken directly from Google search listings below shows, many WordPress site owners have not set up their sites to use WordPress permalinks …

Although Google is still indexing the above sites, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get greater SEO benefit out of using and improve your site’s traffic results, you should configure your permalinks structure to make it more SEO-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless characters.

WordPress allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published posts, so your content can go from this …

To something with an SEO-friendly URL like this …

By default, WordPress post URLs are not very SEO-friendly. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure the Permalinks section of your WordPress site to automatically get better indexing results in search engines.

How To Configure WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress dashboard select, Settings > Permalinks …

This brings you to the Permalink Settings screen …

As mentioned earlier, by default WordPress web URLs use characters like question marks and numbers to create unique Post Ids and URLs. We want to create a search engine friendly URL instead for our posts. To do this, we need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default.

Common Permalink Settings

In the Common Settings section, select Custom Structure, then add one or more ‘tags’ (see below) to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(Configure your permalink settings to create SEO-friendly URLs)

If you use the custom permalink structure shown in the example above, your URL would look something like this:

http://www.mytravelsite.com/budget-cruises/river-cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=8303

(Using post name permalinks helps visitors and search engines understand what your page is about)

Pretty Permalink Tags

“Pretty” permalinks, or SEO-friendly URLs, are created by adding one or more ‘tags’ in the Custom Structure field:

• %year% – The year the post is published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘01’)
• %day% – The day the post gets published (e.g. ‘07’)
• %hour% – The hour your post gets published (e.g. ‘17’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘56’)
• %second% – The exact second the post gets published (e.g. ‘43’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of your post (e.g. ‘2353’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Signs That You’re About To Get Fired From Your Job!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-signs-that-youre-about-to-get-fired-from-your-job” (all lower case characters and no exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the wording in your post title in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
• %category% – A sanitized version of the category name. Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier – the string of characters used in the URL). Tip: You can edit this text in the category slug field in the New/Edit Category screens.
• %author% – A correctly formatted version of the author name.

Note: When using multiple tags, separate each tag using a ‘/’ (forward slash), or hyphen.

For a quick setup, choose the Custom Structure option, and enter the code below into the ‘Custom Structure’ field …

Or, use one of the following structures:

Tip: If you want search engine friendly URLs for your posts, but don’t want to use a custom permalink structure using tags, then choose Common Settings > Post name instead …

Choosing ‘Post name’ is the same as adding the /%postname%/ tag in ‘Custom Structure’.

Optional Permalink Settings

If you need to configure custom permalinks for your category and tag page URLs here is where you would do this.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following structure:

• domain.com/category_base/category_name
• domain.com/tag_base/tag_name

For example, changing your category base to “topics” will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/topics/category_name/’.

So, if you add the following to your permalinks Optional > Category base settings field …

Your ‘category archives’ page URL will change from this …

To something like this …

If you leave the fields blank WordPress uses the default settings.

Remember to save any changes after you have finished …

Permalinks – Useful Tips

Sometimes, when you are creating a new post and haven’t given the content a post title yet, the WordPress Autosave feature will save your draft with an assigned numerical permalink (see the example URL in the screenshot below)  …

To fix this and give the post its proper permalink, go to ‘Edit Post’ …

Click on the ‘Edit’ button in the post slug section …

Select all content in the post slug field and delete it …

Click ‘OK’ …

The post slug entry will be replaced with the correct permalink based on your post title …

Here is a quick recap of the process …

Remember to update your post to save the changes …

Your permalink should now reflect the new post title …

Note also that when you change the URL of a published post, you should also create a redirect link …

If you change your post title at a later date (e.g. you think of a more compelling post title or use a headline generator tool to help you come up with some killer post titles), remember to fix the permalink to match the new post title and add a redirection to the new post URL …

Make sure that your permalinks match the titles of your posts and pages to help site visitors find what they are looking for and ensure that search engines will better index your content …

Permalinks – Tips

Use Descriptive Categories

To get the best benefit from using Permalinks, it’s important to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, WordPress will use the default category (uncategorized).

According to WordPress SEO expert Joost de Valk, here are some things to keep in mind if you are wondering whether or not to add categories to your permalinks:

• If your category slug is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), you may want to use categories in your permalink.
• If your post slug (the part of your URL that identifies your post) is too long, it can make your post URL harder to copy and decrease the SEO benefit.
• Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you plan to post content under multiple categories, then it’s recommended that you do not use the category tag in your permalink structure.

Despite being the subject of intense debate in WordPress SEO circles, when it comes to category vs no category there really is no perfect permalink structure to use. Choose a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Your post URLs should be short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in another article.

Avoid Using Time-Specific Permalink Syntax

Another useful tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your aim is to run a news site or there is a special reason why you need to date your site’s content, it’s best to avoid using date-based permalink settings for your URLs.

(Avoid using permalinks that time-stamp your posts)

People are less likely to click on posts that are several years old, even if the content is relevant to the answers they are searching for.

What If My Site Has Lots Of Published Posts?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you perform a new WordPress installation. This should be part of your website planning process.

If your website or blog is already established or your site already has many posts indexed in the search engines and you would like to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is really necessary, as making changes to permalinks after your site has been running for a while can create issues and loss of traffic.

Use 301 Redirection

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, many WordPress users (or their web developers) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started out, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you would like to optimize your site better for search engines. Maybe your site was originally set up to display post dates in your web address and now all of your content is perceived as being out-of-date and you want to delete the date portion in your URLs.

The best way to edit your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or rankings in a negative way is to use ‘301 redirects’ to reassign links set up using the old permalinks syntax to URLs that use the new syntax.

Search engines interpret a code ‘301’ as a link that has permanently relocated to another destination. 301 redirection is the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new site destinations and avoid ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should configure a redirection system before messing with the permalink structure of your site.

You can WP site using a redirection plugin like Simple 301 Redirects, or Redirection, or get a professional to help you set up and redirect your permalinks correctly to avoid any problems and troubleshoot any errors.

(Set up link redirections using plugins or get professional assistance)

Congratulations! Now you know how to change your site to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. To learn more about using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

***