WordPress Permalinks : All What You Will Need To Know

In this guide, I will teach you how to master WordPress Permalinks to get the best possible structure for your website.

WordPress become by far the most used CMS in the web according to recent statistics, by empowering 50% of the entire Internet. As we as a web host, we shave almost of 90% of our clients using WordPress as their content management system. And this is huge.

Some clients use it a blog, magazine, membership or e-commerce based CMS, you can use it for almost anything or any project. The power of WordPress comes from its active community, and it’s a very modular, meaning they are tons of plugins out here to choose from. But running a healthy WordPress blog need a strong knowledge of it’s is structured. In this WordPress training series we will start with WordPress Permalinks as an introduction to making WordPress as your core business.

The Default Permalink Structure

By default, WordPress uses the user friendly Sample Post structure. In the previous versions of WordPress it was the Plain structure, wish was like this https://www.hostgarou.com/?p=123, which was not user friendly and not recommended by search engines like Google.

SEO WordPress Permalinks Tips

SEO permalinks is not a structure that you will find under your WordPress dashboard > Settings > Permalinks. But rather it’s a structure loved and recommended by search engines like Google, and If you would like to optimize your website for SEO and rank higher in the search results, you should optimize for permalinks.

The best version of permalinks for SEO looks like this : https://www.hostgarou.com/blog/wordpress-permalinks/ in this article.

Here is the killer features of this WordPress permalinks version:

1. Easy of use.
2. Clear and user friendly.
3. Search engine friendly.
4. Automatically eliminate stop words from the URL
5. Uses dashes over underscore
6. Awesome ans clean structure
7. Easy to remember by visitors
8. Targeted keyword is clear

And the reason why we have started this WordPress series by permalinks is because it’s the first thing you should consider adjust before start publishing your posts. Imagine if you have articles already indexed in Google and people start linking to your website or back-linking with you, and suddenly you decide to change your WordPress permalinks structure. This will returns 404 error pages on your websites when people visits you old link or click on your backlinks, and will decrease your backlinks porfolio and your ranking. But, if you insist on changing your permalinks, then you will need to set up 301 permanent redirection to your new permalinks, this will avoid all those issues.

Matt cutts, an ex-google’s engineer and head of the WebSpam team has switched to the SEO friendly WordPress permalinks and it’s for a good reason, listen to him:

Final Thoughts

Your WordPress Permalinks structure defines the publishing future of your website an should be set up in the earlier stage directly after installing your WordPress blog on your server.