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Best WordPress Permalink Structure for SEO & Performance

Permalinks, in simple terms, are the permanent web addresses of your individual blog posts, pages, and categories.

These unique web links (URL’s) will be used by other sites when they link to specific pages/posts on your site. Your permalinks should remain permanent and not change unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Note: If you decide to change the structure of your permalinks, try and change it before you start adding content or you will need to redirect every permalink to the new structure, otherwise you existing links will not work.

You can change your permalink settings at Dashboard >> Settings >> Permalinks.

Setting the best custom structure is crucial for website performance reasons and search engine optimization. Its important to use a structure which is both good for performance and contain keywords for better Seo.

By default, ‘Out of the Box’ WordPress uses what is called an ugly permalink structure with code after your domain name.

Example: http://yourdomain.com/?p=n1 (Ugly Permalink Structure)

Your site visitors cannot read this url and neither can the search engines as its not descriptive of your page/post title and content.

Pretty Permalinks

Pretty permalinks are structured so you can include descriptive keywords which give your readers and search engines an idea of the content of that page/post.

This allows both your readers and the search engines like Google to understand exactly what the page/post content contains.

Example: http://yourdomain.com/steaks/tbone

Not to hard to work out this page is about Tbone steaks and filed under the steaks category. Highly descriptive and excellent for searchers looking for information on tbone steaks!

WordPress Custom Permalink Structures

Changing your permalinks is easy as long as you understand your links will need to be redirected unless you are starting a new blog from scratch.

I use the category/postname permalink structure as i believe its highly descriptive of the content of that particular page/post.

WordPress advise against this suggesting you not start your permalinks with category,tag, author, or postname fields.

The reason is that these are text fields. Using them at the beginning of your permalink structure takes WordPress more time to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL).

To compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in it’s database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties).

This information is now out of date and WordPress have rectified the performance issues however have not yet updated their advice in the codex.

I have never experienced any problems with this custom permalink structure however i do suggest beginners choose from one of the other options.

Other permalinks structure are:

  • Day/Name
  • Month/Name
  • Postname
  • Year/Postname
  • Posts/Postname

Seo & Performance

For SEO purposes category/postname is best permalink structure in my opinion.

It is also advisable to keep your main focus keywords at the start of your permalinks while shorter permalinks generally receive better results in the search engines.

For Website performance i would suggest any of the above 5 listed in point form.

A popular structure for performance is http://yourdomain.com/year/month/postname/.

Using a number before the text description contained in your postname rather than using a category text name decreases the page loading time of your posts and pages.

The best permalink structure for performance alone is /%post_id% in the URL however this would not be of any use for the search engines or your visitors as its not descriptive of the content of your post/page and doesn’t contain keywords in the URL.

I suggest you try this instead:/%postname%/

Changing Permalinks

Here’s a great redirect tool for changing WordPress permalink structure.

When changing your permalink settings make sure to add /%before%/%after%/ your structure.

Best Structure

I suggest beginners choose one of these:

  • /2012/08/01/sample-post/
  • /2012/08/sample-post/
  • /sample-post/

Even though none of these structures contain category in the permalinks, you can still use and change categories without breaking any of your links or without the need to use redirects if you do change the category your posts are assigned to.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. nikz says

    February 15, 2014 at 5:43 am

    Hello ,
    After change permalinks to custom permalinks in my website
    URL show http://example.com/sample-page/page-title
    so i need to remove sample-post in URL, i can not find where it is coming, my website running with wp e-commerce plugin .
    kindly help me to solve my problem.

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    • Brad Dalton says

      February 15, 2014 at 5:47 am

      Did you try and re-save your Permalinks?

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      • nikz says

        February 15, 2014 at 6:44 am

        Yes ,changed and saved but all products permalinks coming with http://example.com/sample-page/page-title but normal pages Ex : contact ,about us page urls are showing that i expected. it means those are http://example.com/page-title .

        so i think this matter coming with wp e-commerce plugin or somewhere related it .
        any comment .

        Log in to Reply
        • Brad Dalton says

          February 15, 2014 at 1:42 pm

          Clearly its an issue with your Permalink structure for specific pages.

          It could be caused by code or a plugin.

          Its impossible to say without a code review as its too localized.

          Log in to Reply
      • Nikz says

        February 15, 2014 at 7:41 am

        Yes re saved , this issues coming with all products pages , other pages URL fine , it means other pages ( contact us ,about us pages) URL http://example.com/page-title

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        • Brad Dalton says

          February 15, 2014 at 1:44 pm

          Maybe its something to do with a plugin like WooCoomerce or the settings on any code you have added for a custom post type.

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