Permalinks are the permanent URLs of your content — your posts, pages, categories, and archive pages. Understanding what they are and how they work is an important piece of making your site accessible to visitors and friendly to search engines.
This guide covers why permalinks matter, the different permalink structures WordPress offers, and how to set them correctly.
What are WordPress permalinks?
The official WordPress documentation describes permalinks as the permanent URLs to your individual posts and pages. They’re called “permalinks” because they should never change — hence permanent link.
For example, the permalink of this guide is:
https://getstartedwp.com/guides/wordpress-permalinks-explained/
And the permalink of the GetStartedWP homepage is simply https://getstartedwp.com. Every piece of content on your site has one.
Permalinks matter for two reasons: they make your content shareable (people can link to and remember them), and they help search engines understand and index your content.
Types of permalinks in WordPress
Plain permalinks
The default WordPress structure, sometimes called the “ugly” permalink. It looks like this:
https://getstartedwp.com/?p=123
Here p is the parameter and 123 is the post’s ID in the database. It works, but it’s not readable, not memorable, and not SEO-friendly — visitors and search engines both prefer URLs that describe the content.
Pretty permalinks
Any structure that uses readable words instead of database IDs. They include the post name and optionally the date, category, or other elements:
https://getstartedwp.com/guides/wordpress-permalinks-explained/
Pretty permalinks are better for SEO and for humans. You should always use one of these structures.
How to set permalinks in WordPress
Go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard. You’ll see these options:
- Plain — the default
?p=123format. Not recommended. - Day and name — includes the year, month, day, and post name.
- Month and name — includes the year, month, and post name.
- Numeric — uses the post ID from the database.
- Post name — just the post slug. Clean and simple; the most popular choice.
- Custom Structure — build your own using tags like
%year%,%monthnum%,%day%,%postname%,%category%, and%author%.
For example, this site uses a custom structure of /%category%/%postname%/, which is why our guides live under /guides/ and our tutorials under /tutorials/.
Do this early. Changing your permalink structure later breaks existing links and can hurt your search rankings. If you must change it on an established site, set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones (the free Redirection plugin handles this).
If you’re setting up a brand-new blog, our definitive getting-started guide walks through permalinks along with every other essential first setting.
