What are Permalinks?
Permalinks, a term for “Permanent Links,” are the URLs used in WordPress to access single pages, posts, and archives on your website. For example, permalinks of a WordPress Blog are permanent and will never change until we do it intentionally from the Backend of a WordPress site.
It is vital to understand Permalinks, as it directly impacts the site users and search engines. A Well-organized permalinks structure is essential in organizing the content of a website more efficiently as well as in attracting visitors and search engines. It will also help in navigating different pages on a site.
In this WordPress Permalinks Structure guide, we will learn the basics of permalinks, how permalinks work in WordPress and how to manage permalinks for better results, and some other tips and advanced settings. We will also have a look at making Permalinks Search engine friendly and how to select a Permalink structure for your website.
Permalinks in WordPress
Permalinks in WordPress can be handled from the Backend easily. You have to navigate to the Settings >> Permalinks in the left-hand-side menu of the WordPress dashboard. WordPress Permalinks are usually classified into different types. Here we will try to explain them.
- Ugly Permalinks: (Default WordPress Permalink Structure which contains Post ID (http://www.example.com/?p=2017)
- Pretty Permalinks: (Custom Permalinks which contains human-readable words like (http://www.example.com/%category%/%postname%/)
1. Ugly Permalinks
Ugly permalinks are the default WordPress Permalinks settings activated when installing a WordPress on your server. This is the most annoying permalinks structure and not SEO Friendly. Almost all the web developers and bloggers switch to Pretty Permalinks right after installing WordPress. Ugly Permalinks are usually not much readable as in the image below.
An ugly permalink usually contains numbers instead of words. The default WordPress permalinks are considered ugly because it uses Post ID in the URL, as you can see below. This is not an SEO Friendly Permalink structure.
https://wparena.com/?p=1232. Custom Permalinks (Pretty Permalinks) in WordPress
After installing WordPress, the first thing to do is create a custom Permalink structure. WordPress allows you to generate permalinks (permanent URIs) on your blog, which appear as though each of your posts is an individual static page on your site rather than the productive output of a database-driven website. A custom Permalink structure will make your blog more SEO friendly and turn those ugly URL’s into Google bait!
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This article was written by Editorial Staff and originally published on WPArena.