Permalinks as the name may suggest are permanent links to your blog’s individual posts, categories, pages. The URL to each link on your website is permanent however WordPress gives you the ability to change these links into what are known as “Ugly Permalinks” and “Pretty Permalinks”.
Getting to these permalink options in WordPress is very easy. All you need to do after logging into your WordPress website is go to the “Settings” menu and click on “Permalinks” and you will be confronted with a page that looks like the page below and you can add, edit, change and adjust your WordPress site’s permalink structure to get it looking just how you want it.
Ugly Permalinks are links that while they are permanent are “ugly” and even though they do work on all sorts of web servers they don’t allow you to tell what topic the page or post you are accessing might actually be about and they look similar to this…
http://example.com/?p=N
Ugly Permalinks also are the system default for WordPress so when you get your WordPress website setup you will see these types of URL’s by default on your website and it will require a little reading to be able to make these permalinks “pretty”. If you are interested in doing this than continue to read on as I will be discussing how you can add pretty permalinks to your WordPress website.
Pretty Permalinks are permanent links that have been made “pretty” so that you can tell what the post or page you are looking at actually is and they look similar to this…
http://example.com/category/post-name/
There are a number of ways to structure permalinks in WordPress either in predefined settings or custom settings built in structure tags in WordPress. There are a number of structure tags that you can use to create your own structure to permalinks including the following structure tags…
- %year% - This shows the 4 digit year (example “2004”)
- %monthnum% – This shows a 2 digit month (example “05” would be “May”)
- %day% - This shows a 2 digit day (example “18”)
- %hour% - This shows the hour of the day (example “15” for 3 pm)
- %minute% - This shows the minute of the hour (example “43”)
- %second% - This shows the second of the minute (example “27”)
- %postname% - This shows the title of the post using the post slug field
- %post_id% - This shows the unique ID number of the post
- %category% - This shows the category name gathered from the category slug field
- %tag % - This shows the tag name taken from the tag slug field
- %author% - This shows the author’s name who authored the post or page
No matter how you want to setup your permalinks, WordPress can help you do this pretty easily.
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