Why should I use permalinks?

If you want bots to index your title alot better so you get higher rankings, you should.

That I believe is the secondary purpose. What permalinks will do is organise your pages to be easily memorable – say for example you have a post called:

“Today my friend married a goat” normally that owudl appear as https://yourdomain.com/post?id=37 or something to that effect. Most people have trouble remembering their own phone numbers let alone a post id number. So what permalinks will do is will take the category-slug which will be a managed version of the post title.

so instead it will display as https://youdomain.com/today-my-friend-married-a-goat

Much easier to remember.

Now take pages; say you have three or four of them, all numbered id=35, id=37 etc. Say one is for your contact page, about page, links page etc.

Permalinks would turn those into the following:

https://yourdomain.com/about
https://yourdomain.com/contact

etc based on the title of the page.

It’s much nicer and easier to remember. A side effect of that is that it should index better in search engines, but I don’t believe that’s the number one reason it’s designed that way, unless you find important to go high in the rankings for whatever reason.

Thanks.

And this question still:

“Also, what happens to any links people have bookmarked or set up as links in their web pages, to existing posts if I change the permalinks now midstream?”

That I believe is the secondary purpose. What permalinks will do is organise your pages to be easily memorable.

I agree. A cruft-free permalink provides context and description. For example, https://www.example.com/2005/03/26/football-match

• let’s me know when it was posted
• gives me an idea what it’s about before even going to the page
• provides a meaningful uri for people to link to
• provides cues to search i.e. I can try navigating to https://www.example.com/2005/ for all the posts in 2005
• is independent of the platform i.e. the fact that it’s using MT or WP, or if it’s on windows/linux is irrelevent

“Also, what happens to any links people have bookmarked or set up as links in their web pages, to existing posts if I change the permalinks now midstream?”
Think of the friendly permalink structure as shortcuts. The underlying page (and links) still work as before. In short, there’s no risk for you at all in moving to this format.

Yes, permalinks is great. You should definately use it.

I am using it now from now ; nicer, indeed…

Thanks ??

Jinson proposed the following examples above:

“Permalinks would turn those into the following:

https://yourdomain.com/about
https://yourdomain.com/contact”

To get these I cannot use the year/month/day structure right? If so, that would get very confusing trying to not duplicate post-slugs over time. But, it sure would be nice to have the above instead of something like following which have to include the date of creation:

https://yourdomain.com/2005/02/01/about
https://yourdomain.com/2005/02/03/contact

Is there a way to get the nice “yourdomain.com/about” (a “page”) and still have posts as “2005/02/25/sample-article”?

The Options/Permalinks page states:

“For the above to work you must have something called mod_rewrite installed on your server. (Ask your host.) If that isna€?t available, you can prefix the structure with /index.php/ . This is the recommend method if you are on any web server but Apache.”

I was thinking this would be cool to do since I have messing with the htaccess file if I don’t need to–just one more thing to potentially go wrong.

Just wanted to verify that I could use it this way, and not worry about htaccess or mod_rewrite:

“index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/”

Pages are written by default without the time structure i.e. example.com/page-slug regardless of what structure has been specified for posts.

The WP panel automatically writes out the .htaccess file for you (in fact it’s probably better if you start from a blank slate and not try to work on top of an existing file).

The best way to see if it suits you is to try it. You can always go back and adjust things if it’s not quite right for you.

“Pages are written by default without the time structure i.e. example.com/page-slug regardless of what structure has been specified for posts.”

You mean if I set it up year/month/day/slug the post or page can be retrieved with either:

site.com/year/month/day/slug

or

site.com/slug

??

If that’s true, that means that no two slugs could ever be the same, right? Even if posted on different days? Does WP guard against duplicate slugs with a warning?

Posts will be retrieved via site.com/year/month/day/slug but pages will be retrieved via site.com/slug

There is no issue with a page and a post having the same slug (I’ve just tested it out on my sandbox and pages trump posts).

Underneath it all, WP is still using page/post id’s as the unique identifier. Slugs and date info are secondary information and can be used for archival purposes (whether by htaccess rules or WP itself).

No, a page would use site.com/slug and a post would include the date info also.

On your last question… I have many articles that I titled the same. The post slug adds a number at the end, so even if I posted two on the same day, they would have a unique slug.

Since it hasn’t been linked to yet: Using Permalinks (WP Codex)

“…once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change.”

Once you publish, it’s pinged the update services, and it’s live. Don’t change that permalink, or you’ll get lots of 404 errors for doing so. If you misspell, it’ll just be something you live with. So, look over your post carefully before publishing it.

For the .htaccess file, it’s not likely that something will go wrong. Just create it as a blank file, change its file permissions to 666, then update the structure in your WP control panel. It’s really simple.

I don’t think you’ll use duplicate slugs on the same day – unless you’re crazy. ??

Okay, I’m getting it. ??

But, still an unsure on something. brvillarin said do not change permalink. In my case, where I have no “slug” permalinks yet, people are linking to my stories with “…index.php?p=7”. So, even if I activated the permalinks in plugins, all the people who are linking to me already should be fine since the old “p=7” type links will still work right?

Something slese that is still confusing me is why my Pages are not currently coming up with the slugs right now as permalinks. For exampel the Contact page on my site is:

https://www.googletutor.com/?page_id=8

The slug is “contact”. I’m wondering why it will not pull up the page with either of the following now:

https://www.googletutor.com/contact
https://www.googletutor.com/index.php/contact

Do I have to put something in the Options/Permanlinks “Structure” field to make the “Pages” permanlink work even this the strcuture field seems to be just for posts not pages?

That doesn’t make sense given the documentation says:

For permalinks in general, you must use mod_rewrite, and Windows server do not support mod_rewrite. If you put a filename at the beginning, WordPress will attempt to use that to pass the arguments and bypass the necessity for mod_rewrite.
EX: /index.php/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

If you use this option, you can ignore the rewrite rules (that is, you can ignore .htaccess).