Watch those permalinks

Permalinks are great, they clean up the ugly ?id=X structure and makes URL:s easy to read and, if necessary, remember. However, if you put special characters in your title and don’€™t review the permalink before hitting that lovely Publish button, you’€™ll get an URL that’€™s even worse than the default ones.

You see, permalinks are usually converted from the post title automatically, and if you’€™ve got special characters in there it’€™ll either remove them entirely (that’€™s the good solution), or replace them with lots of funny characters (% and such). If the latter is the case, you’€™ll get an extremely long and clunky permalink that looks like shit.

So here’€™s the tip! Check your permalinks and beware of special characters – Microsoft Word will give you tons of those if you copy-paste from there. What’€™s the use of permalinks if they look awful?

View Comments (4)
  • TDH,
    problem is once someone already using default structure or having a shared hosting (3-4 domain under one hosting), it’s a mess when you want to change the Permalink.

    As you know it takes Google ages to find and update, and also the people who are linking those posts.

    Any thoughts on that?

  • Actually, I haven’t had any problems with shared hosting and permalinks. I guess you could have, though.

    You should definitely have the correct permalink setup from the start. If you change your permalink structure after a while you will have invalid links. The easiest way to sort that out is to create an informative 404.php page for your theme that explains to visitors who follow an old link why they are not finding what they where looking for.

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