The other day I went on 4 or 5 toot rant on Twit­ter about issues I often come across in web­sites I visit.¹ It was a bit of a let­ting off of steam and on Twit­ter, were you’re lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters, it’s not that help­ful since I just com­plained and didn’t pro­vide any real solu­tions to the issues I was com­plain­ing about.

The Prob­lem

When you first setup a Word­Press website/blog/etc., the pages and posts you cre­ate all get a unique URL ² which is great. Helps com­put­ers and peo­ple to be able to tell the dif­fer­ent pieces of con­tent apart. The prob­lem is that the default set­ting is for the URL to look some­thing like www.websitename.com/?p=123 and www.websitename.com/?p=124. Not very easy to tell what kind of page you’re get­ting when you visit that URL, nor is it easy to tell some­one later on to just go to www.websitename.com/?p=123 to find the infor­ma­tion you need.

The Solu­tion

Video Ver­sion

Direct link to Vimeo or YouTube version.

Text Ver­sion

Luck­ily, as with most thing Word­Press related, the solu­tion is pretty sim­ple. Here’s the xx step process to make your URLs look nice for everyone.

• Login to the Word­Press admin
• Go to “Set­tings” and then “Perma­links” (should be some­thing like http://www.website.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php)

• Choose “Month and Name” (My per­sonal pref­er­ence but “Day and Name” works too)
• Click “Save Changes”

Once you do that, Word­Press will automag­i­cally change page links from things like www.website.com/?page_id=2 to the more human read­able and eas­ier to remem­ber www.website.com/about/ for Pages and www.website.com/2012/01/title-of-post for Posts.

It makes Google hap­pier for search results³ and makes your users happy because they can nav­i­gate and find things on your web­site much quicker and easier.