What is a Permalink?

WordPress permalinks are the permanent URLs of your posts, pages, categories, and other archive pages. “Permalink” is short for “permanent link”: once an address is published, it shouldn’t change, because other sites, bookmarks, and search engines all point to it.

The six permalink structures in WordPress

You set a permalink structure once for the whole site, and WordPress offers six of them:

• Plain: example.com/?p=123. The default on a fresh install. It works on any server, but the URL says nothing about the page.
• Day and name: example.com/2026/08/06/sample-post/
• Month and name: example.com/2026/08/sample-post/
• Numeric: example.com/archives/423, built from the post’s ID in the database.
• Post name: example.com/sample-post/
• Custom structure: a pattern you build from tags, such as /%category%/%postname%/

Readable, keyword-bearing structures like Post name are known as pretty permalinks. They depend on server configuration your hosting provider sets up, so if pretty permalinks won’t work on your site, contact your host.

Which permalink structure to choose

Use Post name for most sites. It’s short, readable, and puts the post’s keywords in the address. Pick Day and name or Month and name only where dates carry real meaning, such as a news archive. WordPress.org’s permalinks documentation backs the readable choice: it calls pretty permalinks “SEO-friendly” and says the Plain setting “is not user-friendly and also not optimized for search engines.” Whichever you choose, set it when you create the site and leave it alone.

Permalink vs. slug

The permalink is the full permanent URL of a piece of content, like https://example.com/blog/sample-post/. The slug is only the final, editable segment: sample-post. WordPress creates the slug automatically by sanitizing the post’s title, so “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post, and you can edit it in the post editor before you publish.

Whether the slug shows up in the address depends on your structure. Plain links by database ID instead, so choose Post name, or any custom structure that includes %postname%, if you want title-based permalinks.

How to change permalinks without breaking your site

In the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks, select one of the six structures or enter a custom one, and click Save Changes. Saving the screen also regenerates the rewrite rules WordPress uses to match URLs to content. To change the address of a single post rather than the whole site, edit its slug in the post editor instead.

Be careful on an established site. WordPress.org’s documentation is blunt about it: these URLs “are permanent and should never be changed — hence the name perma link.” Know what the setting actually touches, too. The structure you pick mainly governs your post URLs. Pages take their addresses from their own slugs, and category and tag archives use separate bases you can set under the Optional section of the same screen. Post URLs that no longer match the new structure can start returning 404 errors, and any inbound links, bookmarks, and indexed results pointing to them break until redirects are in place.

If you must switch, treat it like a small migration. Inventory the URLs that will change, create a one-to-one 301 redirect from each old address to its new one, and test the redirects after you save the change. Then update your internal links and XML sitemap, and watch your crawl reports for 404 errors over the following weeks.

For a full walkthrough, including how to create the redirects, see our guide to managing your WordPress permalink structure.