WordPress Permalinks – A Complete Guide for 2025

Last updated - December 19, 2024

WordPress permalinks are the route to access specific content on your website.

Permalinks need to be tackled efficiently to make sure that the audience does not face any issues while browsing through your website.

In this blog, we’ll learn more about WordPress permalinks, including what they are, why they’re important, the different types of permalink structures in WordPress, best practices for using them, and how to change them.

Let’s get down to business.

Table of Contents

What are WordPress Permalinks?

WordPress Permalinks are permanent URLs for your website content. Every page on your website will have a unique URL and it will look something like this:

websitename.com/blog

The WordPress permalinks are available for the following:

Posts
Pages
Archived pages
404 Pages
Catalog Pages

Why is WordPress Permalinks Important?

Two different aspects make WordPress permalinks important.

Firstly, it helps users to anticipate what the page is about. Especially for blogs, the user can understand what kind of topic that the blog pertains to.

Secondly, organic ranking through SEO is very integral for businesses these days. Structuring a good permalink can help search engines identify what the page means, which in turn helps in organic ranking and indexing of the page.

Difference between Permalink, Slug, and Links

Permalink: Permalink is the complete link to a page or a post.

Slug: It forms the last part of a permalink. When you structure a title for a blog post, WordPress creates a slug based on the same. A slug looks like this:

WordPress-permalinks-guide

You can also restructure and create a slug manually.

Links: Links are different from that both of these. These hyperlinks are found within the content in the form of internal and external links.

Types of WordPress Permalink Structures

To set different types of permalinks, you need to go to Settings and then click on Permalinks:

In the next window, you can see different permalink structures:

Different-structures-Of-WordPress-permalinks

Plain Permalink Structure: As the name suggests, it doesn’t have any information on what the page is leading to. It’s a predefined page ID structure. This permalink structure doesn’t give search engines much to work on.

Day and Name Permalink Structure: This structure has the date and name of the page in question. This gives better clarity on the name of the page as well as the day it came into the picture. The relevancy of the page can be easily determined.

Month and Name Permalink Structure: It is similar to what we discussed above, the only difference being instead of the elaborate date, the month of publishing is mentioned in the permalink. It can help users determine how old the article or page is.

Numeric Permalink Structure: This is similar to plain permalink structure. It uses the post ID and discloses no information to the crawlers.

Post Name Permalink Structure: This permalink structure includes the name of the article or post directly. You can get creative with the name but it will be ideal to limit it to three or five words.

Custom Permalink Structure: The custom permalink structure can be made according to your preferences. You can add attributes based on your choices from the available tags.

Optional and Product Permalink Settings

Just like how post and pages can have their customized permalinks, WordPress lets you form a custom structure for category and tag archives.

If you run a WooCommerce store, you can further customize product URL links. Product permalinks can be structured using:

Default structure;

Shop base where the structure will have the word shop in it and thus directed to Shop Page;

Shop base with the category which is even more detailed as it directs to the shop page and then to the specified category page;

Custom base where the users can customize the permalink according to their preferences.

Using WordPress Plugins to Create Permalinks

Permalink Manager Lite

Key Features:

Edit Individual Permalinks
Edit Permalinks in Bulk Format
Rewrite base slugs easily
Auto-redirect URLs
Remove parent slugs from URLs

Pricing: It’s free to use but if you need to access the pro version the price for one domain is set to 45 euros.

Custom Post Type Permalinks

Key Features:

Customization of permalinks using code snippets

Pricing: It’s a free open-source plugin.

Custom Permalinks

Key Features:

Set the URL of your post, page, category, tag, etc. the way you want it.
Redirect old permalinks to the new address
Proper control over the site structure

Pricing: Most features are available in the free version. Changing custom taxonomies and customer support are available only in the pro version which is $79/year.

Best Practices to follow while setting up WordPress Permalinks

To make sure your permalinks are on point, make sure to follow these practices:

Short and Memorable URLs: Shorter URLs are easier to share with others. It also helps in making your social media posts short and crisp without having a long chain of URLs attached to them.
Infuse keywords: From an SEO perspective, it will be ideal to infuse keywords into the URL. It’s a good practice to do it as it will help in organic ranking.
Avoid stop words: To restrict the number of characters and avoid cluttering the URL. The stop words are the usual prepositions that can be removed while building a WordPress permalink.
No special characters: Avoid special characters unless and until it is very necessary.

Conclusion

A good WordPress permalink structure can help bring visibility and understanding as to what that page refers to. Throughout this blog, we have discussed the different ways through which a permalink can be structured and the best practices to follow while creating a permalink.