What are pretty permalinks?

The pretty permalink of the single page in WordPress is the shortest one, just the name of the page. The child page has also the name of the parent page in the permalink.

The post slug refers to the last part of your permalink. It can be edited directly through the post editor.

When you create or update a “pretty” permalink structure, WordPress will generate rewrite rules and attempt to insert them into the proper .htaccess file. If it can’t, it will say something like You should update your .htaccess now and print out the rules for you to copy and paste into the file (put them at the end).

Use the following instructions to create pretty permalinks for your blog posts.

To enable pretty permalinks in Word Press:

  1. Log on to WordPress with Administrator user rights.
  2. In WordPress, click the Settings tab.
  3. On the Settings page, click the Permalinks subtab.
    This will take you to the page where you can customize how WordPress generates permalinks for blog posts.
  4. On the Permalinks page, select Custom structure and enter “/%postname%/” in the Custom structure text box.
  5. Click Save changes.
    All the blog post links will have URLs that follow the format that you have specified.

Now, why this one? http://www.YOURSITE.com/%postname%/

Quite simply, it holds the least amount of unneeded clutter… There are no seemingly random numbers, no dates, no arbitrary words (like “archives”). There’s just the post name that you can control 100% (more on that in the next point).

Note. Why you don’t want dates in your permalinks?The main reason is because dates discourage your visitors from reading your older content.ny date that’s older than last week (or so) looks like out-of-date information, despite the fact that it might still be very valid, or might even be evergreen.

Once you have the overall permalink structure set, you can proceed to tweaking your individual posts and pages.

This can be done through each individual post’s or page’s editing screen. When you’re editing content, you’ll see this little area directly below the title field:

Note: Try not to update the permalink structure once you publish your post or page. Changing those links later on makes finding your content more difficult for people as well as search engines.

Setting the right permalink structure is one of things that you should do after launching any WordPress site.