How to create SEO friendly URLs by changing permalink settings in Wordpress 3.3

Shashwat Srivastava

Shashwat Srivastava

— 2 min read

While doing search engine optimization for your website, it is important to ensure that the title and URL of webpages contain relevant important keywords which have been used in content. If your article has clean and user friendly URL, then it increases the chance of your webpage to appear at top in search results. By default, the URLs generated by WordPress are not SEO friendly and appear like this:

WordPress default generated URL

Here, I will show you how to change this permalink setting and automatically create SEO friendly URLs by configuring WordPress. Follow the steps listed below:

  • Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
  • Then from the left sidebar, go to Settings -> Permalinks.
WordPress - Go to Permalink Settings Page
  • Next, you will be taken to Permalink Settings page.
WordPress Permalink Settings Page
  • As you can see in the above screenshot, WordPress provides us with some pre-defined permalink structures. We can either use one of them or define a custom permalink structure. Here, we will define a permalink structure. In order to define custom structure we can make use of the following structure tags:

Structure Tag Name            Description                                    %author%            The author of the post                            %category%            The category of the post                            %day%            The day the post was published, for example 15 for the fifteenth day of the month                            %hour%            The hour the post was published                            %minute%            The minute the post was published                            %monthnum%            The month the post was published, for example 02 for February                            %post_id%            The post ID, for example, 2                            %postname%            The name of the post                            %second%            The second the post was published                            %tag%            The tag field                            %year%            The year the post was published, for example, 2012

  • As an example, let us define our custom structure as /%author%/%postname%/, as shown below:
Define a custom permalink structure in Wordpress
  • Click on Save Changes.
  • That's it! Now, if you go and check URL of any post it will be displayed based on new permalink structure. A sample is shown below:

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