I am Jeff

WordPress permalinks can be a tricky subject.  So I’m going to stick to the basics in answering this question I received from a Real Estate agent up in Seattle: “do u have any permalink structure recommendations?”

Why yes, yes I do…  Here’s how I’ve set permalinks on pretty much all the WordPress blogs I’ve ever setup:

Straight outta the box, WordPress permalinks are stupid. You can see the default setting in the image above and the corresponding URL structure. It’s horrible for search engine optimization. The next two settings aren’t bad, but they’re not great. The last setting, is pretty much just as worthless as the default.

We want to go with a custom structure, that helps maximize how the search engines see the keywords in your URL. As you can see in the image, my preference is to use the category and post name options in the custom URL structure. By doing so, whatever words you choose to use for categories are included in your URL along with the title of each blog post.  It should be noted that this specific string of structure tags is not recommended for WordPress sites that contain a lot of pages. If you’ve got more than a thousand pages, you should add the /%year%/ tag into your permalink structure to avoid the related performance issues. This will grow increasingly important as Google adds site speed into their web search rankings.

Ok, so all that seems pretty easy right?  Yeah, it is…  The hard part of changing your permalink structure is when you’re told you need to change your permissions in order for WordPress to write the new permalink structure. This doesn’t always happen, but if it does, be careful. If done incorrectly, you run the risk of frying your WordPress install or leaving it vulnerable to attacks.  Best to call in a professional if you’re not sure exactly what to do or completely comfortable with the associated risks.

So, hopefully that answers the question for you and gives you a better idea of why you would want to set things up this way.  When setup correctly, the custom permalink structure can help immensely when it comes to SEO.

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This is part of the “pick my brain” series of wordpress support posts. An experiment in social support. If you find this post useful, feel free to donate.