The structure of the URLs of your website is crucial for the Search Engines to be able to understand what the page is about. Afterward, if a person is searching for similar to your content, the Search Engine(whichever it is) will present him with the most relevant results from the web. This is pretty much the only way for people to find themselves on your website, reading the content you’ve created. Presuming of course that your website is new, and you don’t use any marketing channel. You can imagine now how important is the permalink structure to your website.
You really need to think about the Permalink structure in the process of your WordPress website creation. Chances are, if you wait too long, it will be too late.
What is Permalink?
Permalink is an URL, leading to a given post or page on your website. The purpose of the permalink, as its name suggests, is for it to be permanent. So, after you’ve decided what type of permalink (URL) structure you want for your website, bear in mind you’ll have to continue with it, no matter what. That’s because if you change the permalink structure and there are a lot of articles leading to one another, after the change they’ll link to places that no longer exist on your website. Yup, it sounds a bit difficult, but we’ll explain. Just be patient.
Every permalink could have two or more building blocks(parts). In WordPress, they could be as follows – domain URL-> category slug->post slug. Of course, pages, tags, or any other entity on your website has its slug.
Let’s get visual!
What Type of Permalink Should I Use?
The idea behind the custom post, category, or page slug is for it to be user-friendlier. What does it mean for the permalink to be user-friendly, you may ask.
Say, one is searching in any Search Engine “what is a permalink”. As you can imagine, a post slug(and thus permalink) /whats-a-permalink/ is far more felicitous than the default
“?p=123” one. Having a permalink built by words is easier to find than the numeric one, thus helping your content to be more accessible. Your article would be recognized by Search Engines as more relevant to the user’s search query.
So, what type of permalink should you create? We believe, that for now, you can answer this question by yourself.
How to Change the Permalinks in WordPress?
You can access the permalink options by going to the Dashboard and then Settings->Permalinks.
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There you’ll find all the types of permalinks you can use.
In order to be able to have a user-friendly post, the best option you could choose is the Post name. After that, while creating a post, you can change the post slug with something that you find the most relevant to the content.