What is the most Efficient WordPress Permalink Structure

Most Efficient WordPress Permalink Structure

We usually don’t think too much about WordPress permalinks but did you know that a bad permalink structure can have a significant influence on the performance of your WordPress site?

What is a Permalink?

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change – hence permalink. [http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks]

In other words a permalink is the URL to each of your WordPress categories, pages and posts.

You can change the settings at: Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.

Common Permalink Settings

In the WordPress, there are 5 common permalinks settings available and one custom structure field.

 

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them; however, WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Why use a Permalink Structure?

Permalinks offer a permanent link to a specific post. This means the link will always point to that content and can be referenced both externally and internally. In other words, the content of the post can change, i.e., it can be updated, without breaking any links to the post.

Permalinks and SEO

As well constructed permalinks contain keywords they can also benefit your page SEO since URLs containing keywords will rank higher according to SEO “experts” and anything that can benefit your rankings can only be a good thing, especially if it’s at zero cost.

Defining the Permalink Structure

So what is the best permalink structure for your blog? Well, in your permalinks you can choose to have, dates, post IDs, categories, tag names, author names and so on.

• You can edit your site’s permalink structure by going to Settings > Permalinks on the Dashboard.

The Permalink URL Structure that I use on the kingsolutions.org.uk, and the one I recommend you use, is as follows:

• /%post_id%/%postname%/
  or
  /%postname%/%post_id%/

Let me tell you why I’ve chosen this format and have not included the %category% tag.

1. The URL is user friendly and easy to read.
2. The URL is SEO friendly.
3. The URL looks clean in the snippets display on the search results.
4. Notice that words in the URL are separated by hyphens and not underscores as suggested by Matt Cutts from Google.
5. No %category% tag! So why haven’t I included the %category% tag? Well, I don’t know about you but I have a habit of changing categories and even moving post between categories (yes, I know, I’m very fickle mined). If you do this type of thing and include the %categories% tag in the permalink then the URL breaks for external links. So my advice is, don’t use the %categories% tag unless you are absolutely certain you are not going to change the category structure in any way.
6. No %date% tag. If, like me, you’re trying to write timeless posts then you don’t want the %date% tag placing a timestamp in the posts URL.
7. Every URL on your blog should be unique, hence the %post_id% tag. I’m not sure if it’s an issue now, but at one time WordPress had database performance problems if a unique number was not include in the URL.
8. Would you like to get your post included in Google News? Well one of their technical requirements says that every article or blog post should have a unique number in the URL. The %post_id% tag satisfies that requirement (you never know).