- Most users choose WordPress because it's free,
it's easy to use,
and it offers an abundance of resources and extensions.
What people don't realize
is WordPress offers an additional benefit
that makes it a powerhouse for CMS solutions,
the opportunity to customize your permalinks,
and make them friendly to view, share,
and even optimize with a keyword or two.
Ooh, love that.
Well, what are they
and how can you use them to your advantage?
Hey, let's talk about it.
- So permalinks are the permanent URLs
of your posts, pages, categories,
and other archive pages on your website.
These URLs are permanent and should never be changed,
hence the name, permalink.
Permalinks help to create the URL structure
that is easy for both humans and search engines
to understand and share.
- So there are a few different types of permalinks,
starting with plain permalinks.
This is the default and it's also called the ugly permalink
and it looks like this,
with P as the parameter and N as the unique ID
to post or page in the database.
WordPress comes pre-installed with this setting
and it works on all server environments.
It's not user-friendly
and also not optimized for search engines.
- Then we have pretty permalinks.
Pretty permalinks are SEO-friendly and attractive.
They usually contain several words,
such as the title of the post or page,
post category, or even the tag name.
You can use keywords in the URL
to make your content readable by search engines.
Pretty permalinks also help others get an understanding
of what the content of the page or post is
by reading the URL.
- WordPress provides a third option
called the almost pretty permalinks
and these permalinks have a /index.php
prefix before them, like so.
Except for this detail,
they are similar to pretty permalinks.
So you might be wondering
how to choose your permalink structure.
On the WordPress dashboard,
go to settings and click permalinks.
You can choose one of the permalink structures
or enter your own in the custom structure field
using the structure tags.
The default setting is plain,
which is automatically configured
when you install WordPress,
but you have the option to use day and name, month and name,
numeric, post name,
or custom structure.
WordPress also provides the structure tags
for creating your own custom permalinks.
These tags are specific keywords
wrapped within the percent character
and you can use these tags to customize your pretty
or almost pretty permalinks.
It's up to you to choose the format that suits you best.
Now, once you've selected the option you want,
either move on to the optional section
or click save changes to save your settings.
- If you're using WooCommerce for WordPress,
you'll also wanna optimize the permalinks
of your products too.
Long, complicated URLs can actually confuse Google
and other search engines,
hurting the results of your on-page SEO efforts.
WooCommerce creates custom post types,
which have default permalinks defined by the plugin,
but you can edit the permalink settings
for the three custom fields,
product categories, product tags, and product attributes.
These work differently from the other two
and has a slightly different structure.
Whatever you add here
will always be followed by the slug
for the individual attribute name, example, size
and the attribute itself, the term like large.
If you wanna edit the slug for a individual category or tag,
go to products>categories, or products>tags,
and edit these in the same way you would
for post tags and categories.
- Permalinks lengths are an incredibly useful feature
of WordPress
and you can use them to enhance your user experience
and boost your search engine rankings.
All right, that's a wrap,
but your journey doesn't have to end here.
We have over 300 videos for you to watch.
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Thank you so much for watching.
This is The Journey.