Wouldn’t it be great if you could add content to your WordPress site, and the following took place … all from your post URL:

• Visitors could easily glean what your post is about,
• Google would discover your posts faster,
• Every single item of content on your website would have its own unique ID, making your content easier to manage.

Well, this is what WordPress permalinks let you do!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

What Are Permalinks?

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

A permalink is the web address that people and search engines will use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in emails pointing to your posts. Some people also refer to permalinks as “pretty” URLs.

Permalinks make the web address pointing to each post on your website permanent, hence a perma-link.

Permalinks – Why Do You Need To Use Them?

As you have probably heard by now, WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems available when it comes to SEO.

WordPress is not only well optimized right out of the box, but its SEO aspect can be further enhanced using excellent SEO plugins.

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

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

Now … let’s review why it’s best to set up permalinks when publishing content in WordPress.

Normally, a default WordPress installation uses a non-search engine friendly link-naming structure for your posts that looks like this …

The above link structure is used by WordPress to find data inside its database. It doesn’t really help your website with on-site SEO.

As the screenshot image from Google search results below shows, many site owners haven’t yet set up their permalinks …

Although these sites are still getting their content indexed on search engines, the owners of these sites are potentially missing out on extra SEO benefits.

To get the best SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s rankings, you should set up your permalinks structure to make it more search engine-friendly by displaying relevant keywords in your URL, instead of meaningless numbers and symbols.

WordPress offers the ability to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can easily go from this …

To something like this …

Out of the box, WordPress post URLs are not very search engine-friendly. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to set up your WordPress permalinks to display your posts with SEO-friendly URLs.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Log into your WordPress admin and 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 “pretty” permalinks instead for our posts. To do this, we will need to specify a different Permalink structure than the default one.

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 …

(Set up your permalink settings to create search engine-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/travel-tips/romantic-european-river-cruises

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6728

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

WordPress Permalink Tags

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

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits (e.g. ‘2018’)
• %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘08’)
• %day% – The day the post is published (e.g. ‘01’)
• %hour% – The hour the post gets published (e.g. ‘21’)
• %minute% – Minute of the hour (e.g. ‘13’)
• %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘57’)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘2418’)
• %postname% – A correctly formatted version of your post title. For example, if the post title is ”It Ain’t Worth Doin’ No More!”, the postname tag will convert this into “it-aint-worth-doin-no-more” (all characters converted to lower case and exclamation symbols removed) 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 sanitized 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 the ‘Custom Structure’ setting.

Optional Permalink Settings

This section lets you set up custom structures for your category and tag URLs.

This changes the ‘base’ category or tag URLs using the following syntax:

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

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

So, if you make the following change in your permalinks Optional > Category base settings section …

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

To something like this …

If you leave the optional settings fields blank the default settings will be used.

Remember to save your changes when done …

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 possible SEO benefit out of using Permalinks, remember to set up your WordPress Categories correctly. If you do not have any categories set up, adding a category tag to your permalink forces WordPress to use the default category (uncategorized).

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

• If your category name is short and descriptive (e.g. uses a relevant keyword or keyword phrase), you may want to add the category tag to 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 share and decrease the SEO benefit.
• 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 ”better” permalink structure to use. Use a permalink structure you think will suit your needs best. Many SEO experts and webmasters recommend making your web addresses short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide more information about WordPress categories in other articles.

Avoid Using URL Syntaxes That Time-Stamp Your Content

Another tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to date your content, it’s best to avoid choosing date-based permalink settings when setting up your URLs.

(Avoid using URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

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

What About Sites With Indexed Content?

Normally, your permalinks should be configured when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your site planning process.

If your site has been running for a while 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 something that absolutely needs doing, as doing so could create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen earlier, some website owners (or whoever set up their site) seem to be completely unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe when you started, your site used the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your site’s SEO. 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 outdated and you want to delete the date portion of the URLs.

The best way to modify your permalink structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO is to add ‘301 redirects’ to point all links using the previous permalink syntax to web addresses that use the new syntax.

A code ‘301’ is interpreted by search engines as a link that has been permanently moved to another location. 301 redirects are the most effective and search engine friendly way to redirect users to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors if they click on an old link.

To create an effective permalink syntax change and avoid SEO problems, sending visitors to error pages, etc. you should set up a redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

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

(Set up a link redirection system for your changed URLs using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display SEO-friendly URLs for your posts. To learn more about using Permalinks, refer to the official WordPress documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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