Setting up pretty permalinks is very easy if you know the importance of pretty permalinks. Pretty permalinks are SEO friendly and user-friendly URLs of your web pages. While this post is about setting up pretty permalinks, you can also read about them in-depth at the article here.
Since version 4.2 of WordPress, Pretty permalinks URLs are already set up as default in WordPress. You already have them if you’re using WP version 4.2 and above. However, if you want to customize them or wish to know what are the options, here is the explanation.
You should also read 10 best practices while writing a blog post to have additional SEO efforts.
Setting Up Pretty Permalinks in WordPress
Go to Settings > Permalinks in the dashboard of your site to access the permalinks settings. You can choose from one of the more common permalink structures or enter your own in the Custom Structure textbox.
Here you see six options to set the permalink structure. The first one, Plain is not SEO & user-friendly so avoid it. Next two Day/Month along with name are somewhat SEO friendly but make the URL unnecessarily lengthy. Also, you update content from time to time while day and month stick within the pretty URL.
However, if you are a news publication and the day/month is relevant to you then “Day and name” OR “Month and name” are reasonable WordPress permalink for you. Business websites should avoid these two structures.
The numeric option is suitable for very few sites like a ticket or forum where a number of support requests are created every day as well as getting higher rank in search engines is not a priority. The number at the end of URL is the unique ID of the post in the database.
Post name is the most pretty and short hence it’s the most preferred choice for user & SEO friendly permalink in WordPress.
If your site is a large publication or you need to organize posts under some general categories names then the Custom Structure well suits you. For example, in this way you can have a category, subcategory than the post name in the URL.
To have the aforesaid URL structure, you will need to provide special permalink tags in the custom structure input box, which is /{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}category{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}/{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}postname{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}/
Here each tag needs to be wrapped with percent signs and trailing slashes (/) before, between and after the tags.
Setting Up Pretty Permalinks Tags for Custom URL Structure
There are few tags available which you can combine to create custom structure and you can also put words in between URL along with at least one tag. Check the list of tags at WordPress that you can use to create your own custom URL structure. Examples are:
To use the word “article” before the post name:
http://www.example.com/article/{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}postname{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}/
To append a dash and Post Id after the post name:
http://www.example.com/{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}postname{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}-{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}post_id{136ce94cc7fec1f5657bab0b4d73ed308318c1024f899c463e79e42d4b375fbf}/
The Category and Tag Base
There are options at bottom of the same permalinks settings page to enter your custom structure for categories and tags pages. Suppose you have a category called SEO & a tag named Themes. If you leave both inputs empty then the structure will be:
http://www.example.com/category/seo
http://www.example.com/tag/themes
And if you set topic and term as Category base and Tag base permalinks respectively then the URL structure will be:
http://www.example.com/topic/seo
http://www.example.com/term/themes
However, it is better to remove the use of the category base in favour of having cleaner and better URL. Consult our article displaying 4 ways to remove category slug from WordPress URL.
We encourage you to read this article before hooking into pretty permalinks setup as well. An established and running site needs extra care to change its permalinks structure.
At last, click Save Changes to save the Permalink settings you have updated. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file to reflect the changes. It’s how setting up pretty permalinks works in WordPress.
