WordPress Post Address Best Practices

WordPress is – you might already know it – the most popular CMS.

There are plenty of good reasons to use WordPress for blogs and websites.

It’s still my favorite online publishing tool after 20+ years!

I use WordPress for more than one blog. Indeed I used WordPress since 2003 for numerous projects.

One of the benefits of using WordPress are the customizable post addresses.

In this case it’s “wordpress-post-address-best-practices”.

I still remember the days before WP and how difficult it was to get clean ones.

Most addresses were utter gibberish, huge random numbers and unreadable.

Modern customized WordPress post addresses are perfect in contrast!

Why and how to change post addresses on WordPress

WordPress lets you change your post addresses with ease.

They can get rewritten to offer the best possible user experience.

There are at least two ways to change them – in general and on post level.

That’s grand yet also there are some pitfalls.

Why should you customize URLs in the first place?

• to make them readable and self explanatory
• to make them Google friendly
• for better archiving
• to make them memorable

Now said that there is no one way to do that. There is no ideal URL structure for WordPress.

It depends on what you need and sometimes on the content itself.

Just think about how you use your WordPress installation.

WordPress can be used for multiple purposes:

• as a blog (most probably but not necessarily)
• as a website
• as a news source
• a an archive or library for real or metaphorically speaking
• as an online store
• as a forum

Now there are several ways to “design”- as in so called URL design – your WordPress post addresses.

After years of practice my favorites are…

Stop, first I want to show you what the average WordPress URLs looked like historically:

1. example.com/?p=215
2. example.com/category-name/wordpress-post-address-best-practices/
3. example.com/2024/06/21/wordpress-post-address-best-practices

None of the above addresses are perfect, most of them have significant drawbacks.

#1 The number is short – There is no need for “short link” services and it does not use any rewrite rules.

I like that in some cases – for instance for blogs that have large numbers of short posts.

You can show off by having a four or five digit post number.

It tells you nothing about the content though. Imagine this link in an email.

Would you click it or rather a link like that: example.com/britney-spears-naked

#2 The category and readable post address lets you categorize your content.

Sadly WordPress categories do not work as expected. You can’t really choose which category is the most important one.

When you ascribe more than one category WP will almost randomly choose one.

Also, the “/” at the end mimics a directory which a post is not.

Do you really want to trick your readers you dirty black hat SEO?

#3 The date and readable post address is great for a historical view.

Yet most blog readers expect current posts on a blog.

Do you really think someone will click on a link like example.com/2015/02/15/breaking-news ?

Leading by example

Now lets take a look at my own post address:
example.com/wordpress-post-address-best-practices

I love simplicity and I wanted my blog to appear to be a real website with real content not just ephemeral blog postings.

It is not ideal for several reasons or rather purposes though.

Let’s say I make a list of 10 items and the add some more.

I can’t change the URL though. Why? It would yield a 404 not found error n the old one.

Consider this URL again: example.com/?p=215

Now changing the headline does not have any impact on it.

Now wouldn’t it be great to combine these two? Yes, as I am a man of “as well” instead of “either or”.

You can and should combine short and self-evident post addresses to get more clicks and beyond.

The solution is fairly simple:

example.com/215/wordpress-post-address-best-practices

This post address has a major advantage:

Long URLs sent by email often get cut at the end or impacted negatively in the process of sending.

It does not matter with this one.

• example.com/215/wordpress-post-address-best-practices
• example.com/215/wordpress-post-ad
• example.com/215/wordpress-post-address-%FC%DF%F6%E4
• example.com/215/
• example.com/?p=215

will all successfully lead to the same post.

Unfortunately this is not enough in many cases. As Google is literal and does not know you are a blog unless you tell it.

You can help Google when you call yourself a blog. Thus you might want to use

example.com/blog/215/wordpress-post-address-best-practices

or better, if you want to rank for the often searched for keyword+blog combination:

example.com/seo-blog/215/wordpress-post-address-best-practices

You can achieve this either by uploading your WordPress installation into the real “blog” or “seo blog” directory on you server via FTP.

Or you mimic it by rewriting again. WordPress lets you add a so called “category_base” to your address.

Dates are sweet

Many people still want to use the date in their address as they write news blogs and for better archiving.

You do not have to fake three directories with slashes (“/”) when doing that.

In case I want to retain the date I use either one of these two address structures:

example.com/20170623
or
example.com/2017-06-23

Also
example.com/2017.06.23
is possible.

WordPress will still allow you to access the years as in “example.com/2017”, months or days.

Now you still have to decide which URL or permalink design is the best for you.

The implementation of the desired URL structure is shown here at WordPress.org or here with some screen shots.

There are also some dirty tricks as I like to call them ;-)

For instance you can add any suffix after the URL. Instead of the good old and pointless “.html” or “.php”

You can add anything you want. In my case something like “.seo” could be useful:

example.com/wordpress-post-address-best-practices.seo

It might look a bit redundant though considering my current address:

seo2.onreact.com/wordpress-post-address-best-practices.seo

Change post address on post itself

Anyway. This address is still not ideal. Why?

It’s a bit long and hard memorize, write down or share!

seo2.onreact.com/post-address 

would be even better.

You can change that on post level either in WordPress directly or using third party plugins like Yoast SEO!

It gets even easier though!

seo2.onreact.com/wordpress-post 

would also work. Indeed it does without any change!

WordPress automatically assigns the truncated or cut off address to the right post!

So unless you have two or more posts starting with the same keywords you can shorten your link when you share it by default!