Website owners usually get confused more often that what the term “Permalink” actually meant to be? Although interesting is that they use it as soon as they develop and publish a new post for your site. The word “Permalink” does confuse everyone at first but to better know it well, it’s the most important part of your WordPress site.

permalink-settings

The reason is simple unless and until you define Permalink well, readers from around the world not able to know about your website or a blog. In better words, Permalinks are the permanent URLs given your blog posts as well as categories and other postings of yours. The URL you allot to the blog posts should remain same and will never change, hence its being called as permalink i.e. permanent link. Some examples:

  • http://example.com/2012/post-name/
  • http://example.com/2012/12/30/post-name
  • http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Choosing your Permalink structure

  1. To start with follow the steps below:
  2. Go to the settings in your WordPress dashboard
  3. Select Permalinks panel (If using WordPress 2.5 earlier version, then check for Options -> Permalinks).
  4. You can choose one of the “provided” and “regular” structures or you can enter your own in the “Custom structure” field using the structure tags (discussed below).
  5. Remember to never use your site URL ad the permalinks. Always use the structure tags or a combination of tags only.
  6. To active, start your permalink structure with index.php/.

Structure Tags

Permalinks comes with some pre-defined structure tags which you can use as either alone or with a combination of tags only. Always do remember to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% which leads you to an individual post.

  • %year%: The year of the post, four digits, say 2010
  • %monthnum%: Month of the year, say 10
  • %day%: Day of the month, say 24
  • %hour%: Hour of the day, say 21
  • %minute%: Minute of the hour, say 23
  • %second%: Second of the minute, say 45
  • %post_id%: The unique ID # of the post, say 423
  • %postname%
  • %category%
  • %author%