The kind of Permalink structure you adopt defines what format your page and post URLs will take, and which have a great impact on SEO. So if you are creating a new website, one of the first things to take care of is changing your Permalink settings which you can find in Settings-Permalinks. If you fail to change your settings from the default, all of your pages and posts will have URLs that look like; example.com/?p=123. Although this is perfectly okay, it is not particularly good, and it might affect how your users and search engines perceive the quality and relevance of your pages.
Changing the permalink structure alters the components, ordering, and structure of your website’s URLs. It’s therefore important to select the correct structure when initially setting up your website, since making changes later after creating your website causes you SEO issues. It is usually advisable for site developers to use a structure that creates URLs that look like; example.com/post-name/ or example.com/category/post-name/, depending on how much you want to place the categorization of your content. For most WordPress sites, deciding on either of these categories will be perfectly suitable.
For the first option, you can adjust your permalink setting to %postname%/. To include your category you can select ‘Custom Structure’ and change the value to /%category%/%postname%/. If previously you are using ?p=<postid> as the permalink, WordPress will take care of all those redirects for you. This is also true if you change from /%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/.
If your site is already established and change from any other permalink structure, you might want assistance on how to change the WordPress permalink structure and all the other tools necessary for this. Later on, we will write an article on how to change your permalink structure and it will be of great importance to those who need to change.