Most of the time, a blogger when starts with a self hosted WordPress blog, he forgets about changing WordPress permalinks. And at later stage, in order to change WordPress permalink, we have to do many things to make sure permalink change is 301 redirection.
WordPress is search engine friendly Blogging platform but when it comes to permalink, default permalink is ugly and doesn’t add value to blog overall SEO.
- For example: wpfreesetup.com/?p=123 (Default and Ugly)
- wpfreesetup.com/free-wordpress-blog-set-up (Pretty and SEO friendly)
Needless to say, a search engine friendly permalink will be really helpful to increase your search engine traffic. If you just installed WordPress, you can simply change your WordPress permalink to anything:
- /%post_id%/%postname%/
- /%postname%/
- /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
and many more combinations. Though I prefer the first one as it helps in faster loading of your blog and if you running a news site and wish to get featured on Google news, permalink with numbers is mandatory. Now the problem is, if you are running a WordPress blog and you change permalink now, your old posts will give 404 errors.
Though WordPress handles the permalink rewrite internally but due to permission issues, you won’t be able to change it directly and here is a quick Workaround that worked for me and I successfully changed the permalink of my iPhone blog from /%postname%/ to /%post_id%/%postname%/.
One of the oldest way to change your WordPress permalink in search engine friendly manner is by using Dean’s permalink migration plugin, but when I tried this plugin today, it didn’t worked for me and I realize the plugin has not been updated from long.
So here is an alternative and basic method which you can use to change WordPress permalink without 404 errors and most important it will be search engine friendly.
How to change WordPress Permalink structure:
Login to your FTP account and change the permission of .htaccess file to 777.
Go toSettings > Permalink under WordPress dashboard and change your permalink to custom permalink and enter your desire permalink structure. More on SEO friendly WordPress permalink structure on another post, but you can quickly grab more info on WordPress permalink from official page.
Click on update and open any link from search engine. You can search using site:domain.com in Google and open link and see if it’s getting redirected to new permalink structure or giving 404 error.
In most of the client site which I worked, this method worked to make search engine friendly permalink migration. Now change your .htaccess file permission back to 644.
How to check if Permalink redirection is 301 redirection:
This is most obvious question you might be having after making changed into your permalink. Go to any of these sites and insert link with old permalink and it will show you if the redirection is 301 (search engine friendly) or not.
Here is a screenshot of my redirection and you can quickly check it’s a 301 redirection:
301 Redirection
That’s it and now take care of normal onpage SEO and keep reading WpfreeSetup for more such useful WordPress SEO tips.
If you face any problem while changing WordPress permalink, feel free to ask questions via comments.
I'm a WordPress lover and using WordPress in my day to day blogging life. Here at WordPress Tutorial blog, I talk about various WordPress tips, plugins and hacks which any WordPress blogger will be needing it. Subscribe to stay tuned with latest update.
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6 Comments
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The only bad thing that happens is you lose all your facebook share and tweet counts
Wish there was a way to retain those numbers.
@Puneet that’s true. Specially if you have a blog with tons of shares on social networking site. Though you won’t lose any traffic and new SEO friendly permalink structure will make sure you get more traffic and thus more share in the future.
I wonder what would happen, if I export the wordpress posts as XML (from Tools), and then reconfigure a fresh install with a new DB, and import the XML. Now on this blog, what if I change permalink structure; would the old google indexed permalinks still redirect properly.
If not, does it mean, when I change the permalink structure in the old blog, does it save some value in the DB/.htaccess file?
I wish i have found this article earlier. But it says that it never too late so i will be changing my blog’s permalink now.
Hi Harsh,
Here you have mentioned to change permalink by using FTP. But from Worpdress dashboard settings>permalink, we can also change permalink easily. Do you think this is ok or using FTP is better? Thanks.
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