WordPress Permalinks 101

After installing WordPress many of you probably noticed that the url structure of your website is somewhat confusing for both search engines and your visitors.

For example you can see ugly url’s like www.website.com/?p=1 where ?p=1 makes no sense, so in this post our goal is to make your WordPress url structure look pretty.

After logging into your WP Dashboard navigate to “Settings–>Permalinks“, select the “Custom Structure” option and input in the field next to it the following /%category%/%postname%/ and then Save.
This will make your url structure look like http://www.mysite.com/category/postname.

Check this screenshot for more.

Another option is make the postname look like a php file with the following custom permalink /%category%/%postname%.php. This is what I m currently using with Makis.TV website making the url of this post to look like https://www.makis.tv/wiki/wordpress-permalinks-101.php.
In order to make this url structure work you need to do one more thing; edit your .htaccess file using an ftp client and insert the following block of code:

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Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

If you are having troubles editing yout .htaccess you can copy it from here.

PS: When you feel comfortable working with WordPress Custom Permalink Settings I suggest going over WordPress Codex for Using Permalinks and find a lot more about it.