Your blog posts have addresses like /?p=482 or /2021/03/14/new-menu-launch/, and someone has told you they should look cleaner. Or you are setting up a site that has been sitting half-finished and want to get the addresses right before anyone links to them. Either way, you have found the screen called Permalinks and are not sure what the options mean or whether pressing Save could break something.
For a brand-new site the answer is quick, and it is given below along with what each of the WordPress permalink settings means. The part that deserves your attention is what happens when the site is already live and indexed, because there a single click on Save changes every post address at once.
What a permalink is
A permalink is the permanent web address of a post, page, category or tag on your site. The word “permanent” is the point. Other sites, Google, your old emails and your printed leaflets all store these addresses, and they expect them to keep working.
The structure you choose in settings mainly shapes the addresses of your posts and post archives. Pages work differently: a page’s address is its slug, with any parent page in front, such as /services/kitchen-fitting/. Changing the structure setting does not add dates or categories to your pages.
The WordPress permalink settings, option by option
Go to Settings → Permalinks. Under Common Settings you will see these choices, each with an example address beside it.
| Option | Example post address | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Plain | /?p=123 | Tells nobody what the page is about. Avoid it. |
| Day and name | /2026/10/23/sample-post/ | Long, and ties every post to a date. |
| Month and name | /2026/10/sample-post/ | Slightly shorter, still dated. |
| Numeric | /archives/123 | Short but meaningless to a reader. |
| Post name | /sample-post/ | Short, readable, does not date. The usual choice. |
| Custom Structure | Whatever you build | Combines tags such as %category% and %postname%. |
Below that, the Optional section has two fields: Category base and Tag base. Left empty, category archives live at /category/name/ and tag archives at /tag/name/. You could type “topics” to get /topics/name/ instead. Most sites have no reason to change them.
The best permalink structure for a business site
For almost every small business site, choose Post name. The address then carries only the slug, which is usually a short version of the post’s title. It reads cleanly when you share it, a visitor can tell what the page is before clicking, and it never looks out of date.
Why not the others?
- Dates make a useful evergreen article look old, and they suit only sites publishing frequent news where the date genuinely matters.
- Categories in the address (a custom structure such as
/%category%/%postname%/) look tidy at first, but if you later rename or reorganise categories, the addresses change with them. When a post sits in several categories, WordPress uses only one in its address, the one with the lowest ID number. WordPress mentions this in the screen’s own help tab, but it still surprises people. - Plain and Numeric say nothing about the content.
If your site already uses a dated or category structure and is working well, that is not by itself a reason to switch. See the section on live sites below before you touch it.
What pressing Save Changes really does
When you press Save Changes on this screen, WordPress does two things, even if you changed nothing:
- It rebuilds its list of rewrite rules, the internal map that turns a pretty address back into “show post 123”.
- On servers running Apache or LiteSpeed, it tries to write the standard WordPress rules into the
.htaccessfile in your site’s root folder. If it cannot write to that file, it shows the rules on screen and asks you to add them yourself.
On Nginx servers there is no .htaccess file. The server’s own configuration has to send requests to WordPress, which your host normally sets up once.
That rebuild is why “re-save your permalinks” is the first suggestion when posts suddenly return 404 errors after a plugin change or a move. Opening the screen and pressing Save without changing anything is safe. If posts are showing “page not found” now, our post on fixing permalinks that cause 404 errors goes through the full list of causes.
Changing the structure on a site that is already live
On a brand-new site with no traffic, change the structure freely. On a site that Google has indexed, that customers have bookmarked, or that you have printed on anything, a new structure changes every post address at the same moment. The old addresses stop working unless something redirects them.
WordPress sometimes manages to guess where an old address should go, but it does not do this reliably for every structure change, so do not count on it. If the change is genuinely worth making, plan it:
- Take a backup of files and database.
- Export a list of current addresses. Your XML sitemap, an SEO plugin export or a crawl of the site will give you one.
- Make the change in Settings → Permalinks and save.
- Add 301 redirects from the old pattern to the new one. A redirect plugin such as Redirection can usually handle a whole pattern with one rule using a regular expression, and some SEO plugins include a redirect manager. Our post on setting up 301 redirects in WordPress explains the options.
- Test a sample of old addresses with our redirect checker tool. Each should return a single 301 to the right new address, not a chain.
- Update internal links and menus so they point straight to the new addresses rather than relying on redirects.
- Watch Search Console over the following weeks for new “Not found” errors.
The same logic applies to bigger reorganisations. If you are redesigning at the same time, the post on 404 errors after a redesign covers finding the addresses that slipped through.
Changing a single slug
The settings screen controls the pattern. The slug for each individual page or post lives with the content itself: the block editor shows it as a URL or Link field near the top of the settings sidebar; in Quick Edit on the Pages or Posts list, there is a Slug field.
Changing one slug changes one address, with the same risk on a smaller scale. For posts, WordPress often remembers the old slug and forwards visitors, but adding a proper redirect for anything that has links or traffic is the safer habit.
Mistakes to avoid
- Switching between structures to “see what it looks like” on a live site. Each switch moves every post.
- Changing the category base on an established site without redirects for the archive pages.
- Editing
.htaccessby hand without a copy of the original. One wrong character in that file and every page returns a server error. - Assuming a security or caching plugin’s own rules in
.htaccessare WordPress’s. Leave sections marked by other plugins alone.
Permalinks are one of the settings our tour of the dashboard menus flags as “know why before you change it”, and our guide on how to manage a WordPress website puts them in context with the other owner tasks.
Frequently asked questions
Is it bad to have dates in my post addresses?
It is not harmful in itself, and news sites use dates for good reason. For a business blog, though, a date in the address can make an article that is still accurate look old, and it lengthens every link. If your site already has dated addresses with traffic, keeping them is usually wiser than changing everything.
Can re-saving the permalinks screen break my site?
Pressing Save without changing the structure rebuilds WordPress’s rewrite rules and rewrites its own section of the .htaccess file on Apache servers. That is normally harmless and often fixes 404 errors. Problems are rare and usually come from a file that was already edited by hand. Keep a copy of .htaccess before you start if you are worried.
Should I remove the word category from my category addresses?
Some SEO plugins offer an option to strip it, giving shorter archive addresses. It is a cosmetic gain, and on an existing site it changes every category address, so you would need redirects. It can also create clashes when a page and a category share a slug. For most business sites it is not worth the trouble.
Does the structure setting change my page addresses?
No. Pages use their own slug, plus the slug of any parent page, whatever structure you pick for posts. A page called Contact stays at its contact address whether posts use dates or the post name. Moving a page under a different parent does change its address, so treat that as a change needing a redirect.
Already changed the structure and now finding old links that go nowhere? That is a repair job rather than a settings question. Repairs like this are what our bug fixing service for WordPress handles, at ₹1,499 per incident onwards.
Next in this series: Change the Timezone in WordPress and the Date Format
