For SEO and site visitor engagement the URLs of your pages and posts can make a big difference. Fortunately new code in WordPress 3.3 allows more freedom in setting the URL link for your content with no negative performance or response time impact for the choice you make.  Now your WordPress based site can have both user and search engine friendly permalink URLs with no penalty.

Prior to WordPress 3.3 setting the optimal URL for SEO and site visitors could cause your site to respond more slowly. This was as a result of a performance penalty related to “verbose rewrite rules” within WordPress which dictated increased database calls for URLs which included only the title or “postname”. Yet for visitor engagement and SEO slower site performance was often the result of an choosing SEO preferred option.

WordPress has a Settings option for what are called “permalinks“, meaning that the URL composition for the page or post can be modified or selected site wide. This is how WordPress describes the feature; “By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.”

Using a URL page/post descriptive keyword structure improves engagementfrom site visitors, who will be more inclined to visit descriptive URLs, and search engines which will be able to index and retrieve keywords from the URL when they match search terms.  This can help a lot with SEO and your site visitor conversion. Google and other search engines have made it so your permalinks are a basic part of a search engine user’s decision making process. The URL permalink appears as part of your search snippet on search result pages. Using redundant terms from categories in your permalink URL option could make your site appear spammy. While using a date in the permalink could make your content seem dated. Both cause unneeded length and useless terms in your URL. Fortunately those compromises are no longer needed.

WordPress permalink performance considerations are now resolved.

Up until WordPress 3.3, there was a quite serious performance issue when you have a lot of pages when you use just the postname, that is solved in WordPress 3.3. We can now use a simple permalink URL having only the domain and postname. This means shorter undated URLs with less redundant terms and more relative keyword content are possible with no performance issues. There are no more excuses to not use just the postname.

The danger of changing WordPress permalink URLs on an established site

Now before you change the permalink URLs of an existing site consider the potential search and SEO impact. Despite how easy it is to change permalinks in Admin, it is complex and can have a dramatic negative impact on your site if you’re not careful. After all you do not want to present a site with many multiple “404 page not found” results to your visitors. There are two steps in changing your WordPress permalink structure.

• The first is simple, go to Settings -> Permalinks and select “Post name”.
• The second step is to redirect your old permalinks to your new ones. To do that, you have to add redirects to your .htaccess file. Fortunately Joost de Valk has created an excellent webpage-based tool to address the potential negative impact from changing the permalink URL for sites which already have external links to content on other sites and in search engines. It automatically generates the redirect for you based on your domain and your old permalink structure which you can then include in your site’s .htaccess file.

If you make the change to your .htaccess file please test it by looking up your content on your site in a search engine and clicking through to that post/page on your site.

For more information about URLs and SEO read this article from Search Engine Journal, “URLs and SEO: Various Strategies for URL File Names“.

And if you have any problem feel free to email or call.