What Is A Permalink In WordPress?

Permalinks play a key role in your website’s user experience (UX) and your search engine rankings. However, the default permalink structure in WordPress isn’t the most SEO-friendly. Plus, it doesn’t tell readers anything about your content.

That’s why it’s a good idea to modify your permalink settings. This way, you can choose a permalink structure that best suits your website and include all the information you need. For example, a content-heavy site may require extra tags and categories, while a news site may feature the publication date.

In this post, we’ll first discuss why permalinks matter. Then, we’ll show you how to create a custom permalink structure and how to change the URLs of individual pages. Let’s get started!

What Are Permalinks (And Why Are They Important)?

Permalink is the name given to a URL for individual blog posts and web pages. If you want to access a specific article, you can enter the exact permalink in the web browser address.

The term actually stands for “permanent link”, so they’re typically used for URLs that aren’t expected to change. A URL is only ever different to a permalink in instances such as redirection.

Typically, a permalink consists of two parts: the website domain and the slug. Let’s look at an article published on the NameHero blog:

Here, you can see the domain name (namehero.com) and the slug (the-best-blog-hosting-for-2025). As a general rule of thumb, permalinks should be short and easy to understand.

So why do permalinks matter? Well, if permalinks aren’t configured correctly, they can lead to broken links, which are bad for the user experience (UX). They also implement a solid website structure and page hierarchy.

While this is great from a usability perspective, it makes search engine indexing and crawling more efficient too. Plus, URL structure is a ranking factor, so good permalink structure can secure your site’s top spots in the results pages.

Additionally, permalinks help people better understand your content, since they provide a pretty good idea of what your blog posts are about. The fact that they’re permanent URLs also allows visitors to bookmark your page or post.

How to Configure Custom Permalink Structure in WordPress

By default, WordPress permalinks aren’t the best for your SEO strategy.

That’s because WordPress fetches pages from the database, so the default permalink features the post number. It will look something like this: namehero.com/?p=123.

This doesn’t tell readers (and search engines) what your page or post is about. You’re also unable to incorporate relevant keywords, which means the default structure isn’t SEO-friendly.

That’s why many website owners choose to create a custom structure, which is easy to do. From the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks:

You can see all your WordPress permalinks listed here. We recommend that you select the Post name option and leave it at that. This results in neat permalinks that describe your page content accurately.

If you want more control over the permalinks in WordPress, select Custom Structure. This lets you add relevant tags, like post name and post category:

That said, you can include any other tags that make sense for your website.

When you’re done, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Save Changes. So now, rather than showing the archive number, your WordPress permalinks will feature the post name and category.

How to Change Individual Permalinks in WordPress

Once you’ve determined the URL structure, you can change permalinks for individual blog posts using the WordPress Block editor.

As we mentioned earlier, this is the part of a permalink called the slug. Note that you can only change permalinks this way before a post is published.

First, you’ll need to open the Post or Page settings to the right of the editor. You should see details of your post here, including an option to change the Link:

Click on the existing URL to customize the last part of the URL. You can also see a preview of the entire permalink structure below (including your domain name):

If you’re happy with the permalink settings, simply save or publish the page. Note that you might not need to manually adjust every URL if you’ve configured the WordPress permalink settings correctly.

How to Optimize Permalink Structure: A Guide to WordPress Structure Tags

If you want to create SEO-friendly permalinks, you’ll need to understand which structure tags to use for your website. Here are the most common ones for configuring custom permalinks:

• Post name. This works great for blog posts since your URLs will tell readers and search engines what your content is about (e.g. namehero.com/permalink-structure).
• Category and name. If you publish posts under various categories and tags (news, blog, etc), you can feature this information along with the post name (e.g. namehero.com/blog/permalink-structure).
• Day and name. For daily news items, you can include the full date (year-month-date) followed by the post name. This isn’t recommended for regular sites since readers might discard outdated content.
• Month and name. If you update content after it’s been published, you might prefer the option that shows the year and month number (e.g. 2025/03) along with the post name.

You can get more specific if you have a content-heavy website. Meanwhile, multi-author blogs might like to use the author tag in the permalink structure.

How to Create Custom Permalinks in WooCommerce

If you run WooCommerce on your WordPress website, you can configure a custom structure for your WooCommerce permalinks.

Like before, you’ll need to go to Settings > Permalinks, but then scroll down to Product permalinks:

Here, you’ll find default permalink structures or you can define a custom structure.

The default permalink option appears like namehero.com/product/sample-product. However, you can also use the shop and/or category tags if you have a large ecommerce store.

Alternatively, select Custom base. However, you’ll have to set a base first in the optional permalinks settings above:

This is how you can configure a custom structure for your WordPress category and tag URLs.

For example, a blog might prefer to use the category base “topics” instead of “categories”. This means permalinks would appear like example.com/topics/news rather than example.com/categories/news.

Can You Change the Permalink of a Published Page or Post?

It’s generally not advised to change permalinks of published content.

This is because it can impact the UX, leading to broken links if you have other content that points to that page. It can also be tricky to change permalinks while preserving SEO.

That said, there are some cases when it makes sense to edit permalinks in WordPress, such as:

• Changing the default permalink structure so it’s more SEO-friendly
• Taking ownership of an existing website
• Transitioning to a different style of website (that requires different categories, etc)

In this event, you’ll need to set up 301 redirects to inform search engines that your content has moved locations. Otherwise, visitors will encounter broken links and 404 error pages which aren’t user-friendly.

Search engines also penalize websites that lead people to error pages so you’ll lose your hard-earned rankings and witness a dip in traffic. The easiest way to do this is to use a redirection plugin (some SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math also offer redirects).

Conclusion

Every web page or post has a permalink so that readers (and search engines) know how to access the resource. However, it’s a good idea to create SEO-friendly URLs to improve crawling and indexing. Good permalink structure also makes your WordPress site more user-friendly.

You can alter all WordPress permalinks from the settings page. If you want to tweak the URL for an individual post, you can use the post settings in the Block editor. You can also optimize permalinks, according to your exact website type, and define a custom structure for WooCommerce URLs.

Do you have any questions about how to adjust the WordPress URL structure? Let us know in the comments below!