When you install WordPress, one of the first settings you should visit - and often one that gets skipped entirely - is the permalink structure. This setting controls how WordPress formats the URLs for your posts and pages, and it has lasting consequences for your search engine visibility, the usability of your links, and your ability to change your URL structure later without breaking things.
What Permalink Structures Are
A permalink is the permanent URL for a piece of content on your site. WordPress gives you several options for how these URLs are constructed, and each produces very different-looking addresses.
Visit Settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard to see the options.
The Available Options
Plain - /?p=123
The default on a fresh WordPress install. WordPress uses a query parameter and a numeric post ID. This is functionally correct but tells visitors and search engines nothing about the content at that URL. Avoid it.
Day and name - /2023/11/09/my-post-title/
Includes the full publication date in the URL. Looks orderly in a time-stamped news context but creates problems for evergreen content (more on this below).
Month and name - /2023/11/my-post-title/
Similar to day and name, with slightly shorter URLs. Has the same fundamental problem.
Numeric - /archives/123
Like the plain option but slightly more readable. Still tells no one anything meaningful about the content.
Post name - /my-post-title/
The recommended structure for almost every WordPress site. Clean, readable, and descriptive. Search engines see the topic of the page directly in the URL.
Custom structure - lets you combine tokens like %category%, %postname%, %year%, and others. Useful for specific site architectures, such as /blog/%postname%/ to namespace posts under a blog subdirectory.
Why Post Name Is the Right Choice for SEO
Search engines use URLs as a relevance signal. A URL like /what-is-email-spoofing/ tells Google exactly what the page covers before a single word of content is read. A URL like /?p=847 tells Google nothing.
Readable URLs also benefit human visitors. When a link to your content appears in an email, a Slack message, or a social post, the URL itself communicates what the recipient will find. A descriptive URL earns more clicks.
The Post name structure is clean, flexible, and what virtually every SEO resource recommends for WordPress sites that are not specific news publications.
The SEO Problem with Dates in URLs
Including the year and month in your URLs might seem like a useful way to indicate freshness. In practice, it does the opposite for evergreen content.
A post about "How to Choose a WordPress Theme" published in 2019 with a URL like /2019/03/how-to-choose-wordpress-theme/ signals to visitors and search engines that this information might be four years old. Even if you update the content annually, the URL still says 2019. Visitors are less likely to click, and search engines may discount the page's freshness signals.
With Post name structure, that same URL becomes /how-to-choose-wordpress-theme/ - and stays current regardless of when the post was written or last updated. You keep all accumulated SEO value without the date anchoring the content to a specific moment in time.
The exception is genuine time-sensitive news content, where publication date is a meaningful and expected part of the URL structure. For most business blogs and content sites, dates in URLs are a liability.
What Happens If You Change Permalinks on an Existing Site
Here is the critical warning: changing your permalink structure on an established site with existing inbound links and indexed URLs is a significant undertaking.
When you change the structure, every existing URL changes. Any link from another site pointing to your old URLs will return a 404 error. Any page Google has indexed under the old URL structure will need to be re-crawled and reindexed. Without proper redirects in place, you lose all the link equity those pages have accumulated.
If you must change your permalink structure on an existing site, you need to set up 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent. The Redirection plugin for WordPress can handle this, and in some cases a server-level rewrite rule is more efficient. But the process requires care, a complete list of your old URLs, and monitoring of 404 errors in Google Search Console after the change.
Set It Correctly From Day One
The simplest advice is to choose Post name before you publish anything and never change it. Go to Settings > Permalinks, select Post name, and save. WordPress handles everything else automatically.
If you are building a new site on dotCanada hosting, this is one of the five-minute configuration steps to complete immediately after installation - before writing a single post.
