You might have come across the Permalink option every time you edited a page or post. In this article we will share what a permalink is and it’s importance.
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What is a Permalink in WordPress?
Permalink or permanent links are the permanent URLs for your blog post or page. Anyone with the permalink for a page or post can view it’s content. A permalink consists of your domain and the slug. The slug can contain anything such as category, date, title text or anything custom.
Importance of Permalink
Permalink plays an important role in your WordPress website. It is very important that you are using the correct format of it.
- A permalink lets you share the content of a post or page with others or on social media sites.
- A permalink will be used by search engines for indexing your posts or pages.
- A good permalink structure can help you in gaining SEO points. For example, using your keywords in the slug part of your permalink can help you with ranking better in search engine result pages.
Steps to change a Permalink for a page or post
There can be many reasons why you might want to change the permalink of your page or post. Thankfully WordPress makes it very easy to do. There are two ways you can change the permalink for a post.
Changing the permalink structure from Settings:
- Visit Settings -> Permalinks from your admin area.
- You will find many formats that you can set for your permalink based on it’s ID, date, categories, post name or any custom format. Select the one that you find the best and save the settings.
For SEO purposes it is best to select the permalink setting as Post name as it is the most beneficial for SEO. Mainly due to having your title keywords in the URL and avoiding any unnecessary words in it.
Changing the permalink of individual post or page
While the global permalink is good you might want to change the permalink for a post or page sometimes too. For being able to change the permalink individually you will have to select either Post name or the custom structure from Settings -> Permalinks.
- Edit the page or post you want to change the permalink for.
- Below the Title field there is a permalink section. Click on the Edit button.
- Enter your desired text, click on the OK button and update the post.
- Your permalink is now updated.
Few rules to follow when setting the slug of your permalink is to use dash instead of spaces and only type in lowercase letters.
Warning:
It is very important to choose your permalink structure wisely in the beginning. Once it is is finalized you should stick with it. Changing it later on can lead to your previous links breaking.