Do you know ‘How to set up permalink in WordPress? Setting up permalink for WordPress posts or pages is quite easy. It is very important for a URL because of being unique and identifiable for each web resource. There are various permalink structures in WordPress and you have to configure the most suitable one that is SEO-Friendly for both the search engines and human readers. All kinds of websites use a specific pattern of URLs which are set up properly with a permalink. When you search for something, you use a keyword and that keyword is a part of the permalink and should be visible in the SEO-Friendly URL.
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What Is a Permalink?
Permalink stands for ‘permanent link’ and it is the last part of a URL that comes after the custom domain name and followed by a slash(/). Whatever post or page you write, it has an individual URL that contains a specific pattern of permalink structure. In permalink, all the structural patterns are not equal in readability, indexing, and user experience.
Thanks to WordPress! It has come with multiple options to choose from. In the earlier days, the pattern of URLs was not optimized because of using fragment factor, number, and date instead of plain text or post name that the majority of the webmasters used to practise. An SEO-Friendly URL is best for both search engine crawlers and human readers.
For example https://www.yourdomain.com/what-is-cookie
In earlier days, it was written something like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?p=3212
Here, both URL are valid but not equal in usability, readability, and indexing. The former URL is more SEO-Friendly and anyone can guess about the content just by looking at it because the permalink is with the post title. But in the case of the latter, neither search engines nor human readers can guess the contents of the post, as it does not contain the post name. That’s why URLs should be optimized for SEO for better user experience and readability.
You can set up a permalink structure for all posts, pages, and even for the entire website by visiting Settings>>General Settings from your WP-admin dashboard. WordPress has made it easy.
Aside from changing permalink for the whole website, you can change or set up URLs for individual posts, pages, categories, or tags as per your needs.
Types of Permalinks in WordPress
Six kinds of permalink structures are available on the permalink settings page. The types of permalinks are:
Plain permalink: In such kind of permalink the domain URL with a protocol like HTTP or HTTPS is clearly visible and the post name is not allowed to be in the same format as it is in original letters. The post name is represented by a unique id. Such kind of permalink looks like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/?p=421
Here, the last part of the permalink, namely, the number is a unique id and it is stored in the database. Browsers can find it but it has no SEO value both to human readers and search engines.
Day and Name-based Permalink: Such kind of permalink is best when you write a post and mention the date and year for specific content. However, it is not recommended for evergreen content. It looks like something like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/2021/04/03/sample-post/
Month and Name-based permalink: If you set up such kind of permalink structure, it will contain protocol, and domain URL and at the last part it will contain year and month followed by post name. It may look like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/2021/5/what-is-permalink
Numeric Permalink: It is a kind permalink that uses a unique number serving as an id for a particular post and the post is stored in the archives of your website. It looks something like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/archives/431Here, the last part of the URL is a number and serves as a unique id for a post. Also, note that as such kind of permalink does not use a post name it has no value to search engines. Even human readers cannot guess the contents of the post just by looking at the URL. Hence, a numeric permalink is not SEO-Friendly and you should not use this.
Post Name: Permalink that uses the post name in the URL is the most popular and readable. In such kind of permalink structure, you will find the post title after the domain URL which is preceded by an Internet protocol like HTTP or HTTPS. It does not use day, month, year, or any unique id for the post. You can guess the content of the post just by looking at its URL. That’s why it is popular both among human readers and search engine crawlers. It has its own custom structure and it looks like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/sample-post. The last part of the URL, namely, the sample post is the name of the post.
Custom Structure: The custom structure lets you choose any kind of option tag for your URL. It has various tags like post name, id, category, year, month, etc. If you select a custom structure for your permalink, then you have to choose a tag out of the following ones, otherwise, the default will be used by WordPress.
How to Set up Permalink in WordPress Posts or Pages?
To set up Permalink for a WordPress post or page is quite easy. You can do it easily. No need to be tech-savvy. Go to Settings from the WP-admin dashboard. Click on settings to make it expand to see other sub-menus under it.
Now, you can see there are many sub-menus like general, writing, reading, discussion, media, permalink, etc. You have set up permalink. So, click on Permalinks and you will see the following page to set up permalink structure.
So far, you have known that there are six types of permalinks in WordPress. Now, which kind of permalink you want to set up for your website is a matter of consideration. I have illustrated a little about this in the third section of this tutorial. So, I think you should choose the permalink structure that uses the post name because of readability and indexing. In other words, the permalink structure using the post names is most popular to human readers because they can easily understand it and search engines too can crawl it easily. Keep in mind that you writing for human readers and not merely for robots. That’s why the post URL should be readable and meaningful.
So, click on the round button located on the left side of a particular type of permalink, scroll down and click save to make your change saved.
How to Change Permalink Structure in WordPress?
If you like to change the permalink structure, then you can do this in the same process as I have discussed above. Go to Settings>>Permalinks. You can see the types of permalink structures on that page. Choose a particular type of permalink, click on the button located on the left side, and don’t forget to save your changes. If you have published a lot of posts and your site receives huge organic traffic, then changing permalink is not a good choice, as it may affect your SEO.
Also, you can include a category base in your post URL. To add a category in the URL, just type the category in the category base field and it will be added to the URL. Suppose, you are going to write a category like WordPress. So, the new URL for the category will be like this: https://www.yoursite.com/category/wordpress. Here, category base refers to the category that wants to use for your WordPress site. Suppose you write the word” Topics” as category base and started to write new categories. Now, all the categories will have ‘topics’ as a category base in their URL. It works for all categories by default.
So, you can write anything in the field provided for category base. If you leave it blank, WordPress takes category as a base by default.
Similarly, you can type ‘Tag’ in the field provided for the tag base. Suppose you have typed a tag called ‘marketing tools. Here, the URL for the tag will be like this: https://www.yoursite.com/tag/marketing-tools. If you leave the tag base field blank, then WordPress, by default, will include ‘tag‘ as tag base in the tag URLs.
How to Change Individual Post or Page URL in WordPress?
Changing individual posts or page URLs is quite easy. You can change a WordPress post or page URL in two ways:
Go to Post from the WP-admin dashboard and click on ‘All Posts. Here, you can see all the posts that you have drafted and published. Now, click on the Quick Edit button and it will allow you to edit the post title. Add to or remove anything you like from the heading and click update. With the change of post title, the URL too is changed automatically. However, if the URL does not get changed with the modification of the post title, then you can go to Settings>>Permalink>>Slug and manually change the URL slug.
There is also another option to change the URL of individual posts or pages in WordPress. To change the URL of a particular post, go to Posts>>All Posts and select the post. Now, click on the ‘Edit’ button and it will take you to the post-editing page. Now, you are going to change a URL but before changing it, change the post title. Because URL contains a post title at the end of it. Once the post heading changes, click on the Settings icon located in the upper right corner of the page. Now, you can see two buttons, namely, the post and block. Click on ‘Post’, scroll down along the scroll bar located on the right side of the block editor and open the Permalink. Once the permalink is opened, go to the URL Slug and manually edit the URL if needed and close the permalink button to save your changes.
How to Change Category or Tag URL in WordPress?
Do you like to change the URL of an individual category? It is quite easy. Go to Post>>Categories from your WP-admin dashboard. Click on the Categories sub-menu located under the post menu. The category page will appear therein. You can see various categories on this page. Now, select the category that you want to edit and click on the ‘Edit’ button. Once you clicked on it, it will take you to the editing page that I inserted here for better instruction.
Now, go to the upper part of the page and change or modify the name of the category. Along with the change of the category, the slug too will be changed. Click save to make your change saved. Also, you can change the category on the same page but here you have to click on the ‘Quick Edit’ button. Once you click on this link, it will allow you to edit the category. So, edit the category and click save.
Similarly, you can edit tags too if required. Go to Posts>>Tags from the hosting dashboard and click on the ‘Tags‘ sub-menu. Once you clicked on the ‘Tags’ it takes you to the tags page. Here, you can see all kinds of tags that you have so far added to your posts and pages. Select the tag that you want to edit and click on the ‘Edit’ button in order to go to the editing page. Once you have landed thereon, you can see the following options such as name, slug, and description of the tag.
Change or modify the existing tag that has been inside the rectangular field in front of the name and look at the slug whether it changes automatically or not. As usual, the slug automatically changes with the change of the tag, however, if it doesn’t change, then manually type the tag in the slug field with hyphens. Once it completed, click on Update.
Also, you can change a tag more quickly by clicking on the ‘Quick Edit ‘ button, and in this case, the link opens on the same page you needn’t go to another page. When the link opens, change or modify the required tag and click ‘ Update.
How to Set up Permalink Redirect and Avoid 404 Errors?
Very often it is found that you are going to visit a page or click on a hyperlink and the browser shows you a 404 not found error. Actually, all the pages or posts on a website contain various links such as internal links, external links, backlinks, etc. You may encounter a 404 not found error when:
- A page or post does not exist.
- A link gets expired.
- The URL of a post or page gets changed.
- Or probably you have caused a change or modification in the URL of your site.
Under such circumstances, when a visitor visits a pre-existing URL, the browser displays a 404 not found error. It means that the URL has either changed to a new location or got expired. In such a case, you need to solve the 404 Errors. Now, the question is how can you solve it?
You can solve 404 errors by redirecting the visitors from the old URLs to the New ones. There are many plugins to redirect URLs and Redirection is an important WordPress plugin that you can install and set up to solve 404 errors.
Simply, install the plugin and set it up to redirect URLs. If needed, you can follow our article on how to install and activate a WordPress plugin. Once the plugin is installed and activated properly, go to redirection. Here, you will see this redirection page. Type the old or pre-existing URL in the field labeled ‘Source URL’ and type the new URL that you have got after modification in the field labeled ‘Target URL’. Once it completed, click on ‘Add Redirect’.
