What Is a Permalink?
A permalink or permanent link is the address (URL) of a web page. It is called a permanent link because it is not expected to change throughout the page's lifetime.
In this post, you will learn everything you ever need to know about permalinks.
In particular, I will explain:
- What are the main characteristics of permalinks
- How a permalink differs from a URL and a slug
- How to make your permalinks SEO-friendly
- What do you do if you need to change a permalink?
Permalink Characteristics
Let’s start with a quick introduction to URLs.
Every page published on the web has a unique Uniform Resource Locator, commonly known as a URL.
The URL represents the address of a page, and it is expected to remain the same as long as the page is published on the web. Thus, it is sometimes referred to as permalink.
The permalink structure of a website is a term that describes how the permalinks of each page will look.
Don't worry if this is confusing now. Read on, and you will understand the relationship between permalinks and permalink structure and how it affects your SEO in a bit.
Here is an example of a permalink: https://www.reliablesoft.net/what-is-a-permalink/
A permalink is made of two parts:
- The website domain
- The page slug
The full address also starts with the protocol (https://) and, on many sites, the www subdomain.
The page slug is the part that comes after the domain and the slash (/). In the example above, the slug is what-is-a-permalink.
There is no official maximum length for a permalink. The often-quoted limit of 2,083 characters was a restriction of the old Internet Explorer browser, not a web standard. In practice, the shorter a permalink is, the better.
Permalink vs. URL vs. Slug
The three terms are closely related and often used interchangeably:
- URL is the technical name for the address of any resource on the web, including pages, images and files.
- Permalink is the URL of a specific page or post that is meant to stay the same permanently. The term is mostly used by blogs and content management systems such as WordPress.
- Slug is only the last part of the permalink that identifies the page, for example
what-is-a-permalink.
In other words, every permalink is a URL, and every permalink ends with a slug. The next section shows how to write good slugs.
How to Create SEO-Friendly Permalinks
A permalink should have all the characteristics of an SEO-friendly URL, which is part of good on-page SEO. Best practices are:
It should start with https – This indicates that the webpage is secure, which means that any information transmitted between the web browser and web server is encrypted.
It should be short and descriptive - A permalink should be short without unnecessary information and describe what a page is about.
For example, look at these two permalinks:
https://www.example.com/what-is-seo
https://www.example.com/2019/12/a/d/DFI_U.html
Just by looking at the first one, you know what to expect before visiting a page while the second one contains information that does not help users or search engines.
Here are more examples of good and bad permalinks:
| Good permalink | Bad permalink | What's wrong with the bad one |
|---|---|---|
example.com/chocolate-cake-recipe/ |
example.com/?p=123 |
Only a post ID, says nothing about the page |
example.com/running-shoes/ |
example.com/2026/09/17/running-shoes/ |
Dates make it longer and the post looks outdated later |
example.com/seo-tips/ |
example.com/SEO_Tips/ |
Uppercase letters and underscores instead of dashes |
example.com/email-marketing-guide/ |
example.com/the-ultimate-and-complete-guide-to-email-marketing-for-beginners-in-2026/ |
Too long, and the year will need changing |
In many cases, a permalink is shown in the search engine result pages (SERPS) and thus it is important to be meaningful as well.
It should include your main keyword – SEO keywords are the search phrases users type in a search engine's search box.
Including the main keyword in your permalink gives search engines a clue about the content of a page. Google has said that words in a URL are only a very small ranking factor, so don't expect a big boost from them.
The bigger benefit is for users: a permalink with the keyword tells them what to expect before they click.
Words in permalink should be separated by dashes – Any words that make up a permalink should be separated by ‘-‘ and not any other characters.
Permalinks are lowercase – To avoid any issues, all letters in a permalink should be lowercase. This is because some web servers treat uppercase characters differently.
It can leave out stop words - These are common words such as “a”, “the”, “on”, “and”, “is”, “of” and “you”.
Removing them keeps permalinks short, but it's optional. Google doesn't penalize stop words, so keep them when removing them makes the permalink harder to read. For example, this page uses what-is-a-permalink rather than what-permalink.
Permalinks in WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system, and ‘permalink’ is the term it uses for the address of every post and page.
You can find the ‘Permalinks’ settings under Settings > Permalinks.
WordPress gives you several options for setting up the URL structure (permalink structure) of your posts:
- Plain:
example.com/?p=123 - Day and name:
example.com/2026/09/17/sample-post/ - Month and name:
example.com/2026/09/sample-post/ - Numeric:
example.com/archives/123 - Post name:
example.com/sample-post/ - Custom Structure: any combination of tags you choose
The best setting for most websites is ‘Post name’. Your permalinks will not contain any unnecessary information, and when you publish a new post, WordPress creates the slug from the title and separates the words with dashes ‘-‘. You can edit the slug before publishing.
Choose the structure when you set up a new website. Changing it on an established site changes every post URL at once, so you would need redirects for all of them.
How To Change The Permalink Without Losing SEO?
Although the idea of a permalink is to be permanent, there are valid cases where you might want to change it.
For example, during an SEO audit, you might decide to shorten your URLs by removing date information.
To prevent your URL change from negatively affecting your SEO, you need to ‘tell’ search engines that you are changing the URL so that they can update their index.
If you make the change without informing them, they will consider it a new page. This means that any backlinks pointing to the page will be lost, and any users who bookmarked the page will get a 404 error since the page has changed address.
To avoid these issues and maintain your SEO rankings, you need to add a 301 redirect from the old permalink to the new one. This tells search engines and browsers that the page has moved permanently.
Here is a step-by-step example:
Let’s say that your current permalink is:
https://www.reliablesoft.net/this-is-a-long-permalink-to-be-made-shorter
and you want to change it to:
https://www.reliablesoft.net/permalinks
If you are on WordPress, you can change a page's permalink by editing the URL right below the title.
Step 1: Visit the page in EDIT mode, change the URL, and click the UPDATE button.
For blog posts, WordPress usually redirects the old slug to the new one automatically. It doesn't do this for pages, and the automatic redirect can break if you later reuse the old slug, so it's safer to add your own 301 redirect.
Step 2: Add a 301 redirect from the old permalink to the new one. There are two ways to do this:
Option A – Use a redirect plugin (easiest): Install a plugin such as Redirection (free), or use the redirect manager in Rank Math or Yoast SEO Premium. Enter the old permalink as the source URL, the new permalink as the target URL, choose 301, and save.
Option B – Edit the .htaccess file: If your website runs on an Apache server, use an FTP program or your hosting file manager to open the .htaccess file in your website's root folder. Make a backup copy first, then add the following line and save the file.
Redirect 301 /this-is-a-long-permalink-to-be-made-shorter https://www.reliablesoft.net/permalinks
Notice that you don’t need to include the domain name for the [source] URL, but you need to include the full permalink for the [target URL].
Step 3: Open a new browser window and test that everything works as expected. If you type the OLD URL in the browser, you should be redirected to the new page.
Step 4: Go to Google Search Console and use the URL Inspection Tool to ensure that search engines can access the new permalink without problems.
Step 5: Ensure the new permalink address is included in your XML sitemap and the old one is gone. If you use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math, the sitemap updates automatically. Read more about sitemaps in our technical SEO guide.
Step 6: Update any internal links on your website that still point to the old permalink, so users and search engines reach the new address directly instead of through the redirect.
Key Learnings
A permalink is a term that describes the URL of a page. Any page published online must have its own unique permalink.
A permalink is made of the domain and the slug. The best permalinks are short, lowercase, separated by dashes and describe the page.
You can safely change the permalink of a page, but to maintain your SEO rankings you need to add a 301 redirect so that search engines and users reach the new address instead of a NOT FOUND (404) error message.
