How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Learn how to set up permalinks in WordPress for improved content navigation and better search engine optimization …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Wouldn’t it be great if after publishing content on your website, the following happened … just from your URL:

  • Visitors could easily understand what your post was about,
  • Search engines would be able to discover your pages faster,
  • Each piece of content published on your website would have a unique identifier, making things easier to manage.

Well, with permalinks you can!

How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks – Definition

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 other people use to link to your articles or sections of your site or the links you send in an email pointing readers to your posts. Permalinks are often called “pretty” URLs.

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

Why Do You Need To Use Permalinks?

As you are probably aware, WordPress is one of the best CMS tools available when it comes to SEO.

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

If you focus on the SEO aspect of your site, then you cannot ignore the importance of your site’s URLs. Google places considerable weight on the URL structure of your site.

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

Now … let’s take a look at why it’s best to configure your permalinks in WordPress.

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

How To Change WordPress PermalinksThe above link structure is used by WordPress to locate data within its database. It doesn’t really mean anything to either visitors or search engines, and it doesn’t help your website with on-site search engine optimization.

As the screenshot image below shows, many WordPress users have not set up their sites to use permalinks …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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 most SEO benefit from using and improve your site’s traffic results, 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 allows you to create a custom URL structure for your published and archived posts, so your pages can go from this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs

To this …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

Out of the box, WordPress URLs are not very SEO-friendly. This tutorial shows you how to set up your permalinks in WordPress to help your content rank better in search engines.

Configuring WordPress Permalinks

In your WordPress admin click on, Settings > Permalinks

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

This brings up the Permalink Settings screen …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs

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 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 SEO-friendly URLs …

Configure your permalink settings 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-deals/cruise-holiday-deals

Instead of this …

http://www.mytravelsite.com/?p=6051

Using permalinks helps readers understand what your content is about

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

WordPress 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 gets published, displayed as four digits (e.g. ‘2016’)
  • %monthnum% – Month of the year (e.g. ‘02’)
  • %day% – Day of the month (e.g. ‘12’)
  • %hour% – Hour of the day (e.g. ‘22’)
  • %minute% – The minute your post gets published (e.g. ‘27’)
  • %second% – Second of the minute (e.g. ‘27’)
  • %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post (e.g. ‘4094’)
  • %postname% – A correctly formatted version of the post title. For example, if the post title is ”Ten Best Hotels In Cote D’Azur!”, the postname tag will convert this into “ten-best-hotels-in-cote-dazur” (all letters converted to lower case and removed exclamation symbols) in the URL. Tip: You can edit the URL wording in the post slug field on the Add/Edit Post/Page screens.
  • %category% – A correctly formatted 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 …

How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks

Or, use one of the following structures:

Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs

Practical Tip

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 …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

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

Optional Permalink Settings

Setting Up WordPress Permalinks

In this section, you can set up custom structures for your tag and category URLs.

You can change the ‘base’ category or tag for your URLs using the following syntax:

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

For example, using “news” as your category base will display your category links as ‘http://domain.com/news/uncategorized/’.

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

Changing WordPress Permalinks

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

Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks

To something like this …

Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks

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

Remember to save any changes when finished …

Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO

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 Short, Descriptive Categories

To get the best benefit from using Permalinks, remember 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 you should add categories to your permalink structure or not:

  • If your category is short and descriptive (e.g. adds a relevant keyword or keyword phrase to your URL), 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 copy or share and reduce the SEO benefit.
  • Do you plan to post content under only one category or multiple categories? If you are going to post content under multiple categories, then we recommend not using 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 is no perfect permalink structure to use. We recommend choosing the permalink structure you think will suit your site best and that will make your web address short enough to be attractive and long enough to be descriptive.

We provide detailed information about WordPress categories in another tutorial.

Don’t Use Date Permalinks

Another great tip from Joost de Valk is that unless your website provides news or time-specific information, or you have any special reason to add dates to your URLs, avoid selecting date-based permalink syntax when configuring your URLs.

Avoid setting up permalinks that time-stamp your content

(Avoid setting up URL structures that time-stamp your posts)

Although using URL structures that date your content is better that using no permalinks at all from an SEO perspective, visitors 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 Changing Permalinks In An Established Blog?

Normally, it’s best to configure your permalinks when you first install WordPress. This should be part of your website planning process.

Useful Information

If your site has been running for a while or your site already has a lot of posts indexed in the search engines and you want to change the permalink structure, make sure that this is something that absolutely needs doing, as changing permalinks after your site has already been up and running for a while can create issues and errors.

301 Redirects

As you’ve seen in the above screenshots of actual search results, some WordPress users (or whoever set up their site) are unaware of the SEO-friendly URLs feature of WordPress.

Maybe you started out using the default WordPress permalinks and now you want to improve your SEO. Maybe your site was configured to display post dates in your URLs and now all of your posts are showing as being 2-3 years old and you want to delete the date portion of the permalinks.

The best way to change your permalink structure without affecting your site’s SEO or existing rankings in a negative way is to add ‘301 redirections’ to reassign links that were set up using the old permalinks structure to post URLs using the new permalinks syntax.

Search engines interpret a ’301′ code as a link that has permanently been moved elsewhere. 301 redirects are the most efficient and search engine friendly way to redirect visitors to new web page destinations and avoid running into ”page not found” errors when clicking on an old link.

To effectively change your permalink syntax and avoid damaging your search rankings, sending visitors to broken links, etc. you should add your redirection system before changing the permalink structure of your site.

You can add a link redirection system to your do this using redirection plugins 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 issues and troubleshoot any errors.

WordPress plugin Simple 301 Redirects

(Set up URL redirections using redirection plugins or use the services of a professional)

Congratulations! Now you know about the built-in system WordPress uses to display search engine-friendly URLs for your posts and improve your search results. For additional information on using Permalinks, see the official WordPress documentation below:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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Originally published as How To Set Up And Use WordPress Permalinks.