The Best Permalink Structure for WordPress is Not What You Think!
If you do a Google search for ‘best permalink structure’, the top search result (as of today) will tell you to do exactly what you should NOT do. And that blogger is not alone. The same advice can be found all over the web. But did you know that a bad permalink structure can adversely affect how your website performs? For that reason, it’s important to peek behind the curtain a little, so you can understand what the best permalink structure is, and why.
First, a simple definition. The term ‘permalink’, or permanent link, refers to a URL on your site that points to a specific blog post or page. These URL locations for your blog posts and pages are intended to be permanent links that would remain unchanged indefinitely, for one very good reason: so that you can continue to gain the SEO benefit from the backlinks that you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
By default, WordPress uses a simple numeric structure that’s based on the post (or page) ID. The code for the default permalink structure is:
/%post_id%/
And it would yield a URL that looks something like this:
http://www.blogforfunandprofit.com/?p=123
The ’123′ at the end is a variable which will match the number of the post or page ID. The advantage to this structure is that it can be processed very quickly by WordPress. The disadvantage is that it carries no SEO benefit whatsoever. In designing the best permalink structure, the idea would be to incorporate a keyword phrase into the permalink URL.
This is why there are so many who recommend one of the following as the best permalink structure:
/%postname%/ /%category%/%postname%/
While both of these permalink structures can provide the SEO benefit that you seek (by incorporating your desired keyword phrase), there’s a different price to pay. That’s because while WordPress is adept at processing numeric values in a URL, it doesn’t do as well with text characters.
Essentially WordPress needs to know whether your URL is referring to a blog post or a page. In trying to make this distinction, there’s some processing going on behind the scenes. When the interpretation is ambiguous, a lot of extra code is stored in the database to try to make it clearer. Only then can WordPress locate the right URL.
If you have a small site, you can probably get away with this. But over the long term, as the size of your website grows, it will take longer for WordPress to query the database and figure out what it needs to display. To your visitors, this means increasingly longer page load times.
For those of you interested in some of the more technical details of this process, there’s an excellent discussion of it here:
So What Is the Best Permalink Structure?
The best permalink structure is one that will both provide you with the SEO benefits that you seek and at the same time, make it easier for WordPress to process the URL request.
From the WordPress Codex itself:
A note about performance: Permalink structures beginning with %category%, %tag%, %author%, or %postname%, require more server resources to resolve than structures such as, Day and Name, Month and Name, and %post_id%-%postname%.
In other words, the best permalink structure is one which starts with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID. A couple of examples:
/%year%/%postname%/ /%post_id%/%postname%/ /%year%/%month%/%category%/%postname%/
Note that each example begins with a numeric variable and ends with the name of the post (%postname%).
It’s really important to determine what the best permalink structure is for your needs and use it from the outset. Permalink structures can be modified, but when you do that, the individual URLs on your blog will change, and all of the backlinks you’ve built will be rendered invalid. There are ways to to redirect the old links to the new, but if you’ve got a large site with hundreds of pages, the process of doing this is cumbersome at best.
Once you’ve concluded what the best permalink structure is for your needs, it’s easy to set up. In your WordPress Dashboard, click on Settings on the left panel and select Permalinks. You’ll see something like this:
Notice that in this example, the Custom Structure setting is selected, with a value of /%year%/%postname%/.
Now that you know what the best permalink structure to use on your WordPress blog is, take a few moments to set it up properly. You’ll be glad you did.
