How to Change the Structure of Permalinks in WordPress
If your site is working with a link structure and you want to change to a different one, contact a professional, since if you do it wrong you could generate many 404 pages.
One of the most important settings (if not the most) when configuring your site is choosing a correct structure for your permalinks, and in this article I will tell you what they are, what they are for, and how to change them.
What are permalinks?
Although it may seem like a very simple definition, a permalink it is a link that does not change, an address that allows anyone to access specific content and whose structure will not be modified.
Therefore, if you write an article talking about "The 5 most famous recipes on the internet", your URL would be of the type https://www.tudominio.com/5-recetas-mas-famosas-de-internet, so if someone wanted to reread that article, they could easily do so using that address.
What are the useful for permalinks?
As I have mentioned before, the permalinks (permanent links in English) serve to create an address that will not be altered and have the possibility of accessing said content in the future, but they also have other utilities that we must take into account:
- They give information to our visitors/readers. Depending on the structure of the link, it can offer more or less information before being clicked, so a semantic structure can be much more usable than using the ID of your post or page. For example, if you are on a blog and you find two links, example.com/best-recipes y example.com/?p=123 , you can easily see how the first one offers you much more information regarding its content.
- They help manage content: A proper permalink structure also makes it easier to work with your content. If your permalinks contain the post name, you can easily link to them within an article. Also, if your website is dedicated to news, having the date on the link itself can be very helpful to know what news to link or not based on its age. In addition, in this last example you would know the date of the event and the title of the event without even entering the page.
How do I change the structure of permalinks?
In order to change the structure of your permalinks, go to Settings > Permalinks. In the common settings section you can choose how you want your links to be displayed, which will show by default /p?=ID-of-your-post.
In mowomo we use the structure where we only show the name of the post, but depending on the project you may be interested in showing the date or not. The options I do not recommend are Simple and Numeric. These, as I have said before, do not provide any information and can be tedious when managing a large number of links.
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Thanks for the article. I have had a website for years and out of ignorance I left the structure that you comment on ejemplo.com/?p=123 in the permanent links. I know this is not ideal and I would like it to have the name of the input. Now it has quite a few daily visits and I'm afraid to change it. Can I do it as you say or would the structure of the web fall?
Thank you.
Hello Jose! This post is intended as a basic configuration of your WordPress. If you already have a site up and running, you can't change it just like that! If you change the URL of one page to another, you will generate 404 errors.
This means that when a person searches Google for the page in question, they will find the old URL. It will click, but it won't take you to the page because it doesn't exist anymore.
The easiest way to solve this is with what is known as 301 Redirects. With a plugin, for example Redirection, you can create redirects in such a way that if a user uses an old link, they will be automatically redirected to the new URL.