Creating custom permalinks in WordPress can give a boost to your search engine optimization, as well as being a valuable marketing tool. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to customize permalinks. It’s easier than you think.
What Are Permalinks?
Permalinks are human-readable URLs that are intended to be, as the name suggests, permanent. As websites became more complex and database-driven, permalinks were created to replace URLs containing variables (URLs like index.php?id=2843&pg=23).
Permalinks are usually made up of slugs (more on those later), which are small groups of relevant words. When we look at a permalink URL, they make more sense to us than random numbers and IDs.
WordPress allows you to select from different permalink formats, or even create custom permalinks. Custom permalinks are useful for marketing, and they are also part of some search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
Why Change Your Permalink Format?
As I mentioned, many database-driven websites (WordPress included) create URLs that contain variables. The default URL structure for WordPress posts used to be:
https://ggexample.com/?p=123
That’s not a very informative URL. But if you installed WordPress a while ago, your site may be using this old style permalink structure.
Google has indicated that URLs are a factor in search engine results rankings. (Though it’s worth noting that Google doesn’t put as much weight on factors that can be manipulated, such as permalinks.)
But when they are relevant to the page contents, permalinks are definitely a factor in ranking. So it’s in our interest to make them as SEO-friendly as we can.
Now, WordPress defaults to “Day and name” permalinks that include the post date:
https://ggexample.com/2020/08/31/hello-world/
By default, pages in WordPress do not use the “Day and name” structure, just the name.
But permalinks can also be made without any date information, like:
https://ggexample.com/hello-world/
In addition to their SEO purposes, permalinks just make for a better looking, more trustworthy URL. I have no idea what I’m going to see when I click ggexample.com/?p=123. But I know what’s likely to be on the other end of ggexample.com/hello-world/.
Whatever your reason for changing your permalink format, I’ll show you how to do it.
We’ll start by talking about the preconfigured “common settings” options that are available in WordPress. Then we’ll move on to creating custom permalinks.
How to Build Custom Permalinks in WordPress
1. Open the Permalinks Settings
Making basic changes to your website’s permalink structure in WordPress doesn’t require a plugin. You can do it in your admin dashboard.
In the left column navigation, mouse over the “Settings” link and click the “Permalinks” link.
2. Select the Permalink You Want to Use
In the “Common Settings” section, you can see that the default permalink setting is “Day and name.” That’s what gives us the ggexample.com/2020/08/31/hello-world/ permalink.
To change to the shorter ggexample.com/hello-world/, click the “Post name” option.
3. Save Your Changes
Scroll down and click the “Save Changes” button.
Now the date is gone from your post permalinks.
Don’t stop here! Be sure to address the side-effects of changing permalink structure.
How to Customize WordPress Permalinks
The “Common Settings” provided by WordPress cover a lot of bases. But if you want more control, there are a few other permalink building blocks available. You can use the hour, minute, and second that a post was published, the category, and the author’s WordPress username.
You create a custom permalink structure by using placeholders. Let’s walk through an example so you can see what I mean.
1. Select Custom Structure Option
On the “Permalink Settings” page, click the “Custom Structure” option.
2. Add Available Options for WordPress
We’ll add the author’s WordPress username to the permalink by clicking the “%author%” button.
You can see that the permalink structure is built in the text field following your website URL. Clicking one of the option buttons inserts the placeholder into the field.
You can also add placeholders manually. Just be sure to separate placeholders with a forward slash, and include a slash at the beginning and end of the sequence. Like so:
/%postname%/%author%/
3. Save Your Changes
Now when we click the “Save Changes” button, the author’s username name is added to the permalink.
The available permalink placeholders are:
- %year%
- %monthnum%
- %day%
- %hour%
- %minute%
- %second%
- %post_id%
- %postname%
- %category%
- %author%
Be sure to address the side-effects of changing permalink structure.
How to Change the Permalink for a Single Post or Page
WordPress uses your permalink structure as a template for your posts. But you can change the slug portion of the permalink for individual posts.
1. Edit the Post or Page
Open a post in the editor.
Click the gear icon to open the post settings.
2. Open the Post or Page Permalink Setting
Click “Permalink.”
3. Edit the URL Slug and Save
Now the slug is editable. There’s also a URL preview below.
In the “classic” WordPress editor, you can edit the slug at the top of the editor page.
Be sure to address the side-effects of changing permalink structure.
Taking Permalink Customization a Step Further
If you need to customize permalinks beyond the WordPress options (or to accommodate custom post types), check out this tutorial.
It shows you how to use a plugin to create truly custom permalinks.
What Are WordPress Slugs?
I said I’d talk about slugs, so let’s get to that. Sometimes people confuse slugs with permalinks. Slugs can be a part of your permalinks, but they are not permalinks themselves.
The slug is the portion of the permalink/URL that describes the page in a human (and SEO) friendly way. (As you’ve seen in the previous sections.) Slugs are created automatically, based on the post title.
If you edit a slug, be sure to follow the standard format:
all-lower-case-letters-separated-by-hyphens
The Side-Effects of Changing Your Permalink Structure or Format
While there are benefits to changing your permalink structure there is one very important issue to be aware of.
Broken links.
When you change the URLs of your posts, existing links will no longer be valid. That means all of your links from other sites (and Google search results) point to URLs that no longer exist.
When you change the permalink structure, WordPress will automatically update the links used in your post lists. So those links will always work.
But links to your site from other sites will lead to a 404 (file not found) error. Also, any internal links that you added to posts and permalinks to custom post types will fail.
You can solve that problem with .htaccess redirects. But that’s complicated, and if you make a mistake (which is very easy to do), you can break your site.
An easier way to solve the problem is with a plugin that provides comprehensive redirection.
Aside from broken links, another consideration when changing permalinks is SEO.
When you change all of the post URLs on your site, Google’s understanding of your site could change. This article goes into detail on making permalink changes without hurting your SEO.
The bottom line is you want to prevent the failure of any links coming into your site.
Permalinks Have Many Different Benefits, Experience All of Them!
Permalinks can be an integral part of your SEO strategy. This is a technical tutorial, so we didn’t really dig into potential SEO benefits. But there are a lot of SEO experts out there who put a lot of stock into permalinks.
Try using keywords in some permalinks and see if you notice a change in traffic. Your post title should already contain your primary keyword, but you may be able to surround it with others. Just remember that the slug/permalink should remain relevant to the post contents.
I mentioned that descriptive permalinks create more “trustworthy” URLs, and I believe that’s one of their main benefits.
How many times have you hovered over a link and seen a long, nonsensical URL, then hesitated to click? It happens to me all the time. I’ll look more closely at the URL if I really want to click the link. But if I’m not otherwise motivated to click a mystery link, I may not.
I may be more careful (or paranoid) than the average person, but it’s something to consider. If you use UTM codes, it’s hard to avoid long URLs. But a descriptive slug in the early part of the URL can help.
How do you format permalinks on your website? Do you prefer a complex or simple structure?
Author: Michael Phillips
Michael Phillips is a web hosting industry veteran, helping people make the most of their web presence since 1995.
I did the same. But page get 404 not found