A common question we get from WordPress users is about permalinks. What are they? What should they be set to? Although WordPress permalinks are a very simple thing to setup, they can make a huge difference in how well your site ranks in the search engines.
What are Permalinks?
WordPress permalinks are the permanent URLs of your blog posts and pages of your site. WordPress is a database driven Content Management System. That means that WordPress references content stored in a database and displays it on the proper web page.
By default your URL, or permalink, will look something like this: https://clikwiz.com/?p=123. This link says go to your domain, and display the content with the page id of 123 in the database. This is very functional, but not very easy to remember. It also doesn’t provide an opportunity to include your keyword in your URL structure.
To get a nice clean URL that uses words instead of a database id, we set the permalinks to a different format. This is done in your WordPress dashboard. Click on Settings, then Permalinks.
There are 5 different options to choose from. We recommend “Post Name” which looks like https://clikwiz.com/sample-post/. Another option is to use “Category/Post Name”. To do this you have to choose “Custom Structure” and enter the following into the text box: /%category%/%postname%. Either structure is fine, whatever you prefer.
The reasons we like using these permalink structures are:
- It’s easier to share the link because it uses words instead of numbers
- You can have keywords in the URL which helps with SEO
I hope this helps you understand WordPress permalinks a little better. If you have questions, please leave a comment below.