Have you ever wondered what’s the most SEO friendly permalink structure in WordPress? We’re often asked this question by new users. That’s because in the past, the default WordPress URL structure was not SEO friendly at all. However that’s changed now. In this article, we will explain WordPress SEO friendly URLs, and how you can customize your WordPress permalinks.
What is a SEO Friendly URL?
Before we go too deep into WordPress permalinks, it’s important that we define what is a SEO Friendly URL.
SEO Friendly URLs contain keywords that explain the article, and they’re easy to read by both humans and search engines. They also improve your chances to rank higher in search engines.
Example of a SEO friendly URL:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/
So what does a non-SEO friendly URL look like?
https://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=10467
By default, WordPress now uses the post name in the URL which is the most SEO friendly URL structure.
So why do beginners still ask us for best permalink structure?
That’s because in the past, WordPress did not use pretty URLs also known as permalinks. The default used to be the non-SEO friendly example that we shared above.
This was changed in WordPress 4.2. If you recently installed WordPress, then your site URLs are SEO friendly.
You can easily verify your permalink settings in your WordPress admin area.
The Permalink Settings Page Explained
In WordPress, links are called Permalinks (short for permanent links). You’ll see the term permalink structure and URL structure being used interchangeably.
First thing you need to do is to visit the Permalinks settings page in your WordPress admin area.
Simply click on Settings link in the admin menu and then click on Permalinks. This will take you to a page that looks like this:
As you can see there are number of choices available.
- Plain
https://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=123 - Day and name
https://www.wpbeginner.com/2016/01/22/sample-post/ - Month and name
https://www.wpbeginner.com/2016/01/sample-post/ - Numeric
https://www.wpbeginner.com/archives/123 - Post name
https://www.wpbeginner.com/sample-post/ - Custom Structure
Choose your own URL structure using available tags.
Let us explain these options a bit, and how useful they are for users and SEO.
The first option which is called plain used to be the default WordPress URL structure. This is not an SEO friendly option.
The day and name option is somewhat SEO friendly as it has the post name in it. However, with dates, the URL becomes too lengthy. But more importantly after some time your content seems outdated, even if you regularly update it. Similarly, the month and name option also runs the risk of being dated.
However if you’re a news publication, then you want to have the dates in your URL to show the recency and improve the user experience.
In our opinion, those two structures are only good for news sites. Business sites that are hoping to create ever-green content should avoid it.
Post name option is the most SEO friendly because it is short and pretty.
If you are running a larger publication, then you can use a custom structure that can also be SEO friendly.
At WPBeginner, We use a custom permalink structure that adds a category name along with the post name in the URL. Because our site is large and contain thousands of articles, it suits us very well. You will see larger publications follow a similar URL structure.
In order to use a custom URL structure, you will need to add special tags in the custom structure box. For example, we use:
/%category%/%postname%/
Notice how each tag is wrapped between percent signs. Also notice the trailing slashes / before, after, and between the tags.
Creating Custom URL Structure with Available Tags
For the best results, we recommend using the options we mentioned above. You can copy the URL structure we use on WPBeginner or choose the post name as your URL structure.
However, there are plenty of other combinations you can create using tags. Here is a list of tags that you can use to create your own custom URL structure:
- %year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2016.
- %monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05
- %day% – Day of the month, for example 28
- %hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15
- %minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43
- %second% – Second of the minute, for example 33
- %postname% – A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). For example, if your post title is This Is A Great Post! It would become this-is-a-great-post in the URL.
- %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
- %category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
- %author% – A sanitized version of the author name.
Don’t forget to click on the save changes button after choosing your permalink structure.
As soon as you press the save changes button, WordPress will automatically update your site’s .htaccess file and your site will immediately start using the new URL structure.
Warning: Important Note for Established Sites
If your site has been running for more than 6 months, then please don’t change your permalink structure.
You don’t have to use the same structure that we used.
By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.
If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You’ll still lose your social share counts on the pages.
There’s only one exception to this rule. If your site is using the plain URLs, then no matter how old it is, you should update the URL structure for better SEO. Yes, you will still lose social share counts, but the benefits far outweigh that.
We hope this article helped you create a SEO friendly URL structure for your WordPress site. You may also want to see our guide on categories vs tags – SEO best practices for sorting your content.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Thanks for this. I find all your articles very helpful!
I have seen where when a post is created it removes words like in, for, at etc. Yoast warns about leaving these words (stop words I believe they are referred to as) in the url. However I notice all your blog posts utilize these stop words. Can you explain why you don’t remove stop words from your urls?
Hi Dwayne,
We believe that this way URLs are more readable and understandable by both human users and search engines.
Hey, thanks for this article! My site was launched this week by a developer and now I am learning WP! I changed my permalink setting to post name – they had it as Day and Name!
Thanks for the information, I will have to change my permalink since my site is just 3 months old.
Sir,
I used custom structure with post name. The main is comes when i change the post permalink the the post permalink is updated in desktop and working fine but in mobile the permalink not updated and gives 404 error.I used news paper please helped me in this matter.
Thanks for this nice write-up.
I have one question and if you could advise, that would be grateful.
I have a WordPress website (not launched yet, testing phase). Registered users can submit post and comments. I am using ‘Post name’ as permalink structure. Issue arises when user changes the post title, the permalink also changes which from SEO point of view will have broken links in search if already indexed. I understand i can switch to ‘Plain’ permalink (Post Id) structure. But I want to utilize URL keywords from SEO point if view.
Is there any to achieve this by using custom permalink structure or only way is to use Plain permalink structure.
1) From Permalink settings in WordPress, I had added “.” (dot) in Category base so now my category URLs are like: example.com/smith instead of example.com/category/smith
Although, you try to enter example.com/category/smith, it will redirect to example.com/smith
2) Now, I have created some pages with the same name as a category, URLs for both are same. Is it bad for SEO?
for example:
parent Category is: example.com/smith
sub-category is: example.com/smith/rr
parent page is: example.com/smith
child page is: example.com/smith/rr
I don’t know what’s going on in backend and how it can affect SEO?
Thanks in Advance.
Hi there,
help please
can someone tell me how using the permalink custom structure tag %slug% works?
How, if at all, is it different to using the structure tag %postname%
thank you, Trish
Hi there: For about two years I had my blog hosted on a wp.com page. One week ago I finally decided to transfer it to a .org domain. That said, do you consider I should change the structure on my permalinks to a more SEO friendly one? I mean, you recomend no to do it if the site was older than 6 months, but I’m not sure if that applies for my recently transfered site. Thanks, guys. Cheers.
Please advice is this SEO Friendly
/%category%/%postname%.html/
Thanks you so much.
How do I make it so the structure would be /blog/category/post-name?
I can’t figure out how to get /blog/ before the category.
Thank you!!
Hello,
How to include the sub category base in the URL, I mean
Website,com/category/subcategory/post
Please help me out. Please make a video tut.
Thanks a lot
Amit Biswas
Hi Amit,
Please take a look at our tutorial on how to change the category base prefix in WordPress.
I’m a new blogger and I’ve always changed my URL. Am I not suppose to and just let it be the default? I have a new WP version so it picks up something just I thought I had to change it every time instead of leaving it how it was.
Hello Naomi,
Yes, you are not supposed to change it once you are happy with a URL structure.
Awesome post.
Hello,
Very good information and nicely touched down every single aspect. I own a News Site hosted on WordPress and using /%category%/%postname%/ in the URL structure. And I want to migrate it to Day and name (/2016/01/22/sample-post/) since I read some articles that states it will increase server up-time speed. I’ve more than 250 posts on the website and older than one year is it a good idea to change the Permalink parameter?
Hello how to include the sub category base in the url, I mean
blog/category/subcategory/post
please help me to find the solution for this
Hi! This is great, thank you! How can I change my post structure on only the posts going forward? I don’t want to change any of the posts in the past, as I’ve been blogging for 5+ years now and I don’t want to loose any of that SEO. Currently I have the post date listed first, but I want to change that to just be the post name as the perma link for both my blog posts and my gallery.
Thank you!
I have been using wordpres for over 6 months now and every time I tried changing my permalink structure from plain to /%category%/%postname%/ I get a 404 error. I hit the “Save Changes” but to not use. can you please tell me what i should do? Thank You!
Try to backup and delete your .htaccess file. Then visit the permalinks page and click on save changes. Refresh your FTP client to confirm that WordPress has generated a new .htaccess file. This should resolve your issue.
I am getting ready to move my site from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. I have about 200 posts on my wordpress.com site. I would like to change my permalink structure on my wordpress.org site to post name. I plan to use wordpress.com’s $13 a year site redirect. Will I have problems with broken links?
From WordPress.com support:
I have changed permalink of my product page.
Now i have an error message of “Duplicate meta descriptions” showing the old permalink and new permalink as duplicate.
How to solve this problem.
What is considered best practice (SEO wise) for internal linking? IE. Using Woocommerce I have links in my product descriptions to options that we offer. I can use the /descriptive-link/ or the /?p=321. Intuition tells me the first is better for SEO but the programing part of my brain says the latter is “safer”
Descriptive links or pretty permalinks are more SEO friendly and safer as well.
This is a great article and its easily explained in layman’s terms. I have one issue that I cannot find a solution to and others may have encountered the same issue. The problem with my blog is that trashed pages. If I have a trashed page, how would I reinstate it without having to change the custom structure to the plain structure? I’ve basically ruined a blog with over one hundred and fifty pages grhhhhhhhhhhh! Any help would be appreciated please
Simply go to Pages and then click on trash. Take your mouse over to the page you want to restore and click on the restore link. If you want the page to not have the URL that it previously had then you can copy its contents and paste them into a new page. Publish the new page and delete the old page.
Great article. I am in a fix now. I have a running site which is around 10 yrs old. Unfortunately my post urls have date in it.
But it’s better late than never.
If I opt now to have my permalink in new post structure, as you said, the older posts will also get changed.
What is the best solution to do it. I can’t afford to hire somebody to do it manually. I can try my hands though.
Is there any plugin or tool which will make my job easy?
I am expecting a response from the readers as well, who have tried it first hand.
I am running following site. but its traffic is not consistant. i am sending you my site link. Please suggest me how i can gain more and consistent traffic and also tell me about my mistakes. Pleasae.
See these tips to drive traffic to your new WordPress site.
This is very nice post thanks for sharing this blog about permalinks.
Hello,
I am using the redirect tool by yoast to redirect my old permalink structure to the new one, it works fine, but the wordpress admin panel not working, giving me the 404 error.
Also the child category posts are also not working. Please guide.
My old permalink structure was /%category%/%postname%.php
And the new one is /%postname%/
Thanks,
Thank you for your article, it was very timely. I love WP-beginner!
However, it still seems a bit over my head. I wish you included more examples. I’m in the process of putting the finishing touches on my website (pure DIY). I haven’t even started blogging on the site so I have been more concerned with how to get . Although I have no idea why %postname% worked but it did so I’m thrilled (%postname% just doesn’t seem to correctly call out the page I want). Anyway, I still don’t have a clue what is meant by “categories”. I appreciate the link you shared, however, it’s still written beyond my pay grade. It says in the article, “WordPress comes with the ability to sort your content into categories, tags, and taxonomies.” It never explains WHY this is useful. Would you mind sharing a bit more on categories from a user point of view please?
Hi, I recently moved my blog from BlogSpot sub-domain to my custom domain on WordPress. After reading through the stuff available online, I chose the ‘Month and Name’ permalink in the WordPress as its being mentioned that this is most similar to what BlogSpot uses and if one is transferring from BlogSpot to WordPress, then one should chose this permalink only in order to loose existing traffic and Google Page Ranking. Now, after reading your article above, it seems that the best permalink would be “Postname’ permalink. Can you please guide me whether I should change my permalink to ‘Postname’ or should I keep it to ‘Month and Name’ permalink?
Hi, this is a very good post about permalinks, thank you.
I have a question about it, is it possible to use regex to dynamicaly rewrite category name in the URL?
Hello! I use custom /%category%/%postname%/ . The categories are English and Farsi (using Arabic characters). The permalink in sitemap for farsi turns to:
/farsi/sms-%d8%a7%d8%b3-%d8%a7%d9%85-%d8%a7%d8%b3/
This is not helpful for SEO. Can you help please? thanks.
Great post. I was using custom pemalinks structure just like u mentioned earlier on my site but when i changed to post name permalink i lost my previous links i shared on social media pages which resulted to error 404.
You just made me understood why.
how to change post categorie number want only one categories dispalyed in website feated
Useful Content for the beginners. I also got some new tips from here. Thanks for sharing.
Hi, i have a question about the permalink structure:
Before to use wp.org i had used wp.com with date+name of post (by default).
Now on wp.org i try to use only the name, but the social link not working, so to fix i have setting post id+name to have a post name and a little numbers before.
Do you think it a good idea? Because all permalink working fine, just only name not working, so i think used id+name could be a good idea
Thanks
Hello! I had a question regarding custom tags. What if I have to use same or similar title, e.g. for outfit post? Is it a good idea to add a numeric value to the URLs as well. I am skeptical about using %post_id% as it will be sequential then and can make some other posts seem out-of-date. How about adding a random number to the URL like tumblr posts. How can we configure it to be part of URL just like categories?
Nicely written. I was absolutely able to understand and follow everything, and to lear, which is the most important thing.