WordPress Permalinks Settings

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Permalinks are permanent urls to your post, pages, categories, and tags used for finding information on your site and is also used to link to your site.

By default wordpress creates these urls or permalinks with question marks and unique id numbers. But wordpress also gives you the ability to create readable, user friendly and search engine friendly urls sometimes referrer to as pretty permalinks.

The permalink settings screen can be accessed from the settings admin panel under permalinks. To avoid 404 errors and broken links the permalink settings on this page should be set and not changed.

The common settings section is where you make these settings.

Wordpress is set at the default with the questions mark and a unique id number but clicking on any of the other radio buttons will change the custom field to that selection using structure tags. A structure tag is the name for the permalink that has the percent sign at each end and a slash at the beginning and one at the end.

You can choose from one of the common structures or you can enter a custom structure using one of or a combination of the structure tags.

There are 11 structure tags that can used to customize permalinks in the custom structure field.

One of the more popular permalink structures is postname which uses the slug -- a slug is the word or words you used to describe a post, page, category or tag. This is usually taken from the title of that post, page, category or tag and appears in all lower case with dashes between words.
The postname structure since is simple and easy to read.
Select one of the settings and click the save changes button.
The changes have been made when you see the yellow success banner at the top of the screen.
Categories and tags are an important part of a site. They help group relevant information together and make it easier to find. When someone clicks of one of the category or tag links on your site wordpress uses the category or tag page template to display this information and uses the word category or tag in the url.
The optional section allows you to use another name for all your category and tag url's. What you put in these fields will be placed in the url instead of the default names of category and tag.
For instance if you change the category base to column then this new base name would appear in the permalink instead of the default name category.
The same applies to the tag base.
These are completely optional.
Remember to save all changes before you exit this screen.
And one final note. The bottom of the permalink settings screen is a place for information about the .htaccess file. This is a file in the root directory that allows these changes in the permalink structure to be processed by the server. If you do not have such a file in the root directory or if it is not writable then wordpress will warn you that you will need to manually add or correct this file. This information will appear in a text box at the bottom of the permalinks settings screen. If you do not see this box and you see the yellow success banner then wordpress was able to make the necessary changes. If you do see this text box then you may need to contact your web host provider for help making these changes.