How to Change the Default Permalinks Setting in WordPress

Make Sure to Change Your Default Permalinks Settings in Your WordPress Blog!

When I stated my first WordPress blog I just wanted to get as much content out as I could to get traffic.  I knew a bit about search engine optimization SEO at the time, but I didn’t know much about WordPress or the way it uses permalinks as names for the posts.

Even more frustrating when I finally learned about how this worked, was how the default permalink settings are set up in WordPress.

As a non-programmer, I don’t understand why they have the default setting the way it is, but from an SEO point of view, it isn’t very search engine friendly.

The good news is, hopefully you’ve read this before you set up your blog, or better yet you might hire me to do all of this stuff for you.

In either case, you should change the default setting for your permalinks (the name of your blog posts) setting before you post your first piece of content.

And there are several ways to set up your permalinks, so I’m not telling you how to set them up, but giving you some suggestions.

So log into your WP admin panel and click on ‘settings” on the left hand column, then click ‘permalinks’.

You’ll see some radio buttons with some default settings, then you’ll see a ‘Custom Structure’ radio button on the bottom.

BIG WARNING IF YOU ALREADY HAVE POSTS USING THE EXISTING DEFAULT – IF YOU CHANGE YOU WILL LOSE ALL LINKS AND THE PAGE WILL DISPLAY A 404 ERROR – GET TECHNICAL SUPPORT WITH SETTING UP 301 REDIRECTS IF YOU HAVE EXISTING POSTS

So you would choose the ‘Custom Structure’ and use the parameters you chose to display as the name of the post.

Here are some options according to the WordPress Forum:

“There are many different formats, but the most common, and most versatile looks likehttp://example.com/category/post-name/or  http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name

Some people eliminate some or all of the date elements (day, month, year) to have a shorter permalink format.”

Here are a list of parameters you can include and what they will return as the post name:

%year% = The year of the post, four digits%monthnum% = Month of the year%day% = Day of the month%hour% = Hour of the day%minute% = Minute of the hour

%second% = Second of the minute%postname% = A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%).

Starting Permalinks with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.

%post_id% = The unique ID # of the post%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.

Starting Permalinks with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.

%tag% = A sanitized version of the tag name (tag slug field on New/Edit Tag panel).

Starting Permalinks with %tag% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons

%author% = A sanitized version of the author name.

Starting Permalinks with %author% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons

Check out the entire forum post on permalinks settings in WordPress

So I changed mine to /%postname%/This allows me to get the best optimization from each post as long as there are primary keywords in the title. 

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