This tip is aimed at those of you using the WordPress blogging platform, or planning to. WordPress is relatively easy to set up. Many web hosting companies offer it as something you can set up with just a few clicks and some configuration information. Even if you don’t have that luxury, it’s still relatively easy to set up.
The problem is that, out of the box, WP (WordPress) has a lot of default options that don’t serve you well. For example, “permalinks”. Permalinks are the permanent URLs for each post that appears initially your blog’s home page, then eventually disappears as more posts are added. The permalink helps you find them. And if your blog is getting its posts indexed, that’s how most visitors will find you from a search engine.
Without getting into a detailed discussion of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), let’s just say that the default permalinks format isn’t exactly friendly. It consists of http://www.example.com followed by something like “/?p=123″. If I told you that this means postid, that may make sense, but it’s still not friendly. And when a search engine indexes the post, you score no extra relevance points for the URL.
On the other hand, if you were to replace that cryptic fragment with something like “/wordpress-choosing-permalinks”, that’s much better for both search engines and humans. That would resemble the title of your post fairly closely, minus punctuation, plus the hyphens. Or you could use /year/month/day/postname, /year/postname, just postname, /category/postname, etc.
Fortunately, that’s very easy to do, as you’ll see in this Tubetorial Quick Tips video in the SplashCast player below.
17 Comments ↓
Tubetorial Quick Tips - WordPress - Choosing a Theme | Tubetorial said:
[...] As I mentioned in the WordPress – Choosing Permalinks quicktips tubetorial, WordPress has a lot of nice features unconfigured out of the box. For example, despite there being probably thousands of free themes for WP 1.5 and 2.x series, the standard install only comes with two themes. One is so so and the other is boring. Neither one is particularly optimized. [...]
Setting Permalinks - Video Tutorial at Wordpress Themes, Plugins, Blog Tips, Make Money Online >> WPthemesplugin.com said:
[...] In order to that you will need to go to “Options” >> “Permalinks” and choose a “Common options” in your Wordpress admin panel, but just in case that sounds to much for you than take a look at Tubetutorial.com’s Tubetorial Quick Tips – WordPress – Choosing Permalinks [...]
Stephen Cronin said:
I agree, changing your permalink structure is a definite must.
However, if you’re just starting, be careful about using /%category%/%postname%/. Using %category% isn’t sensible, unless you are very sure that your categories won’t change. I fell into this trap – as my blog matures, I need to tweak the categories, which would break my permalinks.
Also, apparantly there is some bug with using just %postname%, but I don’t use it so I haven’t come across it. Pity, as I wanted to use it! Have you had any problems? Would be very interested to know.
Raj said:
Thanks for the comment, Stephen. After I wrote this, I did have trouble. In hindsight, I recommend you do not use the “category” versions of permalinks at all. Especially if you’re prone to using more than one category per post. Also, if you ever move your database, you may encounter unwitting permalink pages.
I didn’t find any bug with just postname. I’ve used in on several new sites, as have some of my clients. But it depends on your Wordpress version. Thing is, WP 2.2.x stinks in a lot of ways. I’m really disappointed with it and seriously regret upgrading some of my sites to it instead of 2.1.x
Melinda said:
I understand how to change permalinks for my posts, but I can’t seem to find how to change the permalinks for my static pages. How do I do this?
franky said:
Melinda, I am not aware of a way to customize page permalinks in WordPress.
raj said:
Melinda, can you please clarify. WordPress does not have static pages. If you’re talking about a regular static website where you create the pages manually and upload them via FTP, well then you’re free to use any naming convention.
Do you mean something else?
Melinda said:
I’m kind of new to Wordpress. I’m talking about the nonblog pages that you can create on a wordpress website such as contact, about, etc. The url for these pages says: /?page_id=#. I want this to be replaced with the name of the page. I am guessing that I might need to do something in my .htaccess folder to accomplish this?
raj said:
Melinda, if you change the permalink structure of your posts, the regular pages will change over to the following:
http://www.yoursite.com/pagename
That’s true even if you have dates in your post permalinks. But if you leave post permalinks in the default form, the “pages” will not change.
Tubetorial Quick Tips - WordPress - Choosing a Theme | Tubetorial said:
[...] Tubetorial Quick Tips – WordPress – Choosing a Theme As I mentioned in the WordPress – Choosing Permalinks quicktips tubetorial, WordPress has a lot of nice features unconfigured out of the box. For example, despite there being probably thousands of free themes for WP 1.5 and 2.x series, the standard install only comes with two themes. One is so so and the other is boring. Neither one is particularly optimized. [...]
Updating Permalinks | MoHDI said:
[...] This article helped me make my decision to update the permalinks to a date + name structure as opposed to a number one. [...]
Ritwik Banerjee said:
I wanted to change the permalink structure in my blog, but I could not follow the video in your post properly. In the “options” section, I don’t see any “permalink” subsection . . . instead, my subsections are “general”, “writing”, “reading”, “discussion”, “privacy”, “deleteBlog”, “openID”, and “domains”. How do I change the permalinks then?
franky said:
Ritwik, our tutorials actually are for self-hosted WordPress installations. WordPress.com regualrly has other settings and is not our focus.
juliemarg said:
Is there a way to change the permalink format for future posts, but leave past posts intact?
I’ve only just realized it would be better to have the format
http://blogname.com/post-name
but I already have 1200+ posts that are indexed and high ranking in the SERPS that are
http://blogname.com/category/subcategory/post-name
BTW, your site is brilliant. I just watched your 7 hack back up my blog vid and it worked perfectly.
41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks : Performancing said:
[...] URLs. Ask yourself what you want to see: mysite.com/?p=123 or mysite.com/new-story? Change your permalinks to something good for both visitors and search [...]
SEO_friendly_URLs: myth_and_fact » malcolm coles said:
[...] http://www.tubetorial.com/tubetorial-quick-tips-wordpress-choosing-permalinks/ [...]
Plastic Surgery Forum said:
Found this post very useful, thanks