Permalinks & URL structure
Learn what WordPress permalinks are, how to choose the right URL structure, and why it matters for SEO and usability.
- Time
- 5 minutes
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- You’ll need
- Administrator access
Every page and post on your WordPress site has a web address — its permalink (short for "permanent link"). The permalink settings control how those addresses are formatted. Getting this right matters for SEO and for sharing clean, readable links.
Quick summary
Go to Settings → Permalinks and choose Post name as your structure. This gives you clean, readable URLs like yoursite.com/about-us. Click Save Changes. Avoid changing this on an existing live site without planning — it can break existing links.
What you'll need
- Administrator access to your WordPress site
What is a permalink?
A permalink is the URL of a specific page or post. For example:
yoursite.com/services— the permalink for your Services pageyoursite.com/how-to-plan-a-rebrand— the permalink for a blog post
WordPress lets you choose the format of these URLs. The format is called your permalink structure.
The permalink options
Go to Settings → Permalinks to see your choices.
| Structure | Example URL | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Plain | /?p=123 | Numbers only. Ugly, hard to share, bad for SEO. |
| Day and name | /2024/03/15/post-name/ | Dates in URLs look outdated quickly. |
| Month and name | /2024/03/post-name/ | Same problem with dates. |
| Numeric | /archives/123 | Numbers only — not descriptive. |
| Post name | /post-name/ | Clean, readable, SEO-friendly. Recommended. |
| Custom Structure | Whatever you set | Advanced — only change with guidance. |
These formats set the addresses of your posts. With any option except Plain, a page's address is built from its slug (for example, yoursite.com/about-us/), with its parent page's slug in front if it has one (yoursite.com/about-us/our-team/).
Post name is almost always the right choice. It creates clean, human-readable URLs that both visitors and search engines can understand at a glance.
How to set (or check) your permalink structure
Go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.
Select "Post name" (unless your developer has recommended something different).
Click Save Changes. WordPress updates immediately. You'll see the message "Permalink structure updated." (If WordPress can't update your server's settings file itself, you'll see "You should update your .htaccess file now." instead. Contact us if you do.)
Opening this screen can fix 404 errors
Simply opening Settings → Permalinks refreshes your site's rewrite rules, and clicking Save Changes without changing anything does no harm. This can fix 404 "page not found" errors that sometimes appear after plugin updates or hosting changes.
Important: don't change this on a live site without planning
Changing permalinks breaks existing links
If you change your permalink structure after your site is live and already indexed by Google, the addresses of your posts change (and your page addresses too, if you switch to or from Plain). Links to the old addresses from other sites, saved in someone's browser, or indexed by Google can stop working.
If a change is truly necessary, it requires setting up 301 redirects to point the old URLs to the new ones. This is technical work — contact us before changing your permalink structure on a live site.
Custom URL slugs for individual pages
Even with Post name selected, you can customize the URL for any individual page or post. When you're editing a page, open the settings panel on the right, click the Page (or Post) tab, and click the slug shown next to Slug. On your homepage this row is called Link and can't be changed there. (In the older Classic Editor, the Permalink field sits below the title.)
For example, a page titled "About Our Team" might auto-generate a slug like about-our-team. You could shorten it to just about by editing the slug field directly.
Good URL slugs are:
- Short and descriptive
- All lowercase, with hyphens between words
- Free of unnecessary words like "the," "a," and "and"
Category and tag base (optional)
At the bottom of the Permalinks settings page, you can set custom prefixes for category and tag URLs. By default, categories appear at /category/your-category/ and tags at /tag/your-tag/. Most sites leave these at their defaults.
Common questions
My pages are showing '404 Not Found' errors — can Permalinks help?
Yes, it can. Go to Settings → Permalinks. Opening that screen refreshes WordPress's internal URL routing (clicking Save Changes without changing anything is fine too), and this can fix mysterious 404 errors.
Should I include dates in my blog post URLs?
We recommend against it. A URL like /2019/05/how-to-market-your-business/ looks outdated as time passes, even if the content is still relevant. The Post name structure (/how-to-market-your-business/) is timeless.
What's a URL slug?
The slug is the part of the URL that identifies a specific page. For yoursite.com/contact-us, the slug is contact-us. WordPress generates a slug from the page title, but you can edit it.
My page URL has random numbers in it — how do I fix it?
Switch to the Post name structure. Then open the affected page and make sure the URL slug is set to something readable. Save the page and check the URL again.
Related guides
- WordPress general settings explained
- Setting your homepage
- Editing SEO titles & descriptions
- SEO-friendly URLs
- How to create a new page
- My changes aren't showing up
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