Blogging Tips: Making Spiffy WordPress Permalinks

Today's guest post comes from Craig who writes over at the blog FossFolks.  He hopes to help others with his information about open source software and ease the transition with his many tips! 

Making Spiffy WordPress Permalinks

Right from the start of my using Wordpress, I didn't like how the URLs got written.  As of the newest Wordpress (3.8, codenamed Parker) there are four choices for how you want permalinks to work.  I'll use the post Five Wordpress Plugins I Can Not Live Without on my own site as an example...

 
Here's the relevant section of the Permalinks page you'll be looking at:

Default

In the Wordpress database, each post has a unique ID.  My post in this example, has an ID of 2100.  The first method of showing permalinks is like this:
http://fossfolks.com/?p=2100
Most of you reading are probably not real familiar with PHP (the language that Wordpress was programmed in) but what this URL means is "get me the post with an ID of 2100"

Day and Name

http://fossfolks.com/2014/01/07/five-wordpress-plugins-i-can-not-live-without/
This method shows the post title in the URL, which search engines like better.  However, it's got the date in it.  While some blog writers might like this, I'm not among them.  It's my opinion that the date ought to be shown in the the post somewhere (like near the title, or at the end in the "written by so and so" section) and unless whatever you're writing about needs URLs written this way, get the date out of them.
 

Month and Name

http://fossfolks.com/2014/01/five-wordpress-plugins-i-can-not-live-without/
This is almost identical to the last method, but is just missing the day.  This only shows the year and month, followed by the post title.
 

Numeric

http://fossfolks.com/archives/2100
Similar to the first method (default) but it replaces ?p= with archives/  This still doesn't strike me as overly SEO friendly.
 

Post Name

http://fossfolks.com/five-wordpress-plugins-i-can-not-live-without/
This is almost what I like.  The blog post title is right there in the URL, which is great SEO-wise, especially if you've got keywords in the post title.  The date is gone too, which gets rid of some clutter, but I think it's still missing something...
 

Custom

http://fossfolks.com is already filled in, but in the text box I've got /%category%/%postname%/ entered.  The URL this produces is
http://www.fossfolks.com/wordpress/five-wordpress-plugins-i-can-not-live-without/
So we've got my domain, the category (I've added a wordpress category recently) followed by the post name.  This seems to be the best as far as SEO goes, and it also makes the most sense to me as far as how post URLs are laid out.  If something is in a dog category, then I think /dog/ ought to be in the URL along with the post title.  When I set up Wordpress for someone, I set the permalinks up this way.

This only works though if you've got the WP No Category Base plugin installed.  If you didn't, you'd end up with http://www.fossfolks.com/category/wordpress/five-wordpress-plugins-i-can-not-live-without/  While this isn't TERRIBLE, it's clutter you don't necessarily need.  The plugin gets rid of the word category from the URLs on your site.

Thanks Craig!  If you have any questions for him about this article please leave a comment below or contact him through his blog FossFolks!

Connect with us!