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What Are Permalinks? A Plain-English Explainer

A permalink is the permanent, unchanging URL that points to a specific page, post, or piece of content on your website. The word is a contraction of 'permanent link.'

What Are Permalinks?

Who this is for: Beginners setting up their first WordPress site or small business owners who want clean, SEO-friendly URLs from day one.

A permalink is the permanent, unchanging URL that points to a specific page, post, or piece of content on your website. The word is a contraction of “permanent link.”

For example: https://yoursite.com/blog/what-are-permalinks is a permalink. It identifies exactly one piece of content and, if set up correctly, never changes.

Quick answer: A permalink is the stable URL of a specific WordPress post or page—short for “permanent link.” WordPress lets you choose the URL structure in Settings → Permalinks. The most SEO-friendly option is Post name (/your-post-title/), and you should set this before publishing anything. Changing it later breaks existing links.

Permalinks affect SEO directly. Google reads the URL as a relevance signal—a URL like /what-are-permalinks/ tells the crawler what the page covers before it reads a single word of body text.

They also affect shareability. A clean permalink is easier to copy, read, and remember than WordPress’s default ugly URL: /?p=123. We see that default structure on client sites far more often than we should—it’s a quick win to fix.

What Does WordPress Use by Default?

Out of the box, WordPress sets permalinks to Plain format: /?p=123. This structure is meaningless to both humans and search engines. WordPress introduced the current permalink settings panel in version 2.1 (released January 2007), and the default has never been SEO-friendly.

The correct setting to choose: Settings → Permalinks → Post name. This gives you /your-post-title/, which is readable, descriptive, and favored by Google.

What Is a Slug?

The slug is the editable part of the permalink that identifies the specific post. In https://yoursite.com/blog/what-are-permalinks, the slug is what-are-permalinks.

WordPress auto-generates a slug from your post title, but you can edit it. Shorter is better—trim filler words like “a,” “the,” and “is” to keep the slug tight. For this page, a slug like what-are-permalinks beats what-are-permalinks-a-plain-english-explainer.

Yes, but with a cost. Changing a permalink after a post is indexed and linked-to creates a broken URL at the old address. Anyone who bookmarked it, linked to it, or shared it will hit a 404 error unless you set up a 301 redirect.

In our experience managing client migrations, permalink changes without redirects are one of the top causes of traffic drops after a site rebuild. Set your structure before you publish—this is a configuration decision, not something to revisit later.

The WordPress Codex covers the full permalink settings options if you want the technical breakdown from the source.

  • Slug — the editable end portion of a permalink that identifies the specific post or page
  • 301 redirect — a permanent redirect used when a permalink changes, to preserve link equity and avoid 404s
  • URL structure — the overall pattern WordPress uses to build permalinks across the site
  • Canonical URL — the authoritative version of a URL, used when duplicate content exists at multiple addresses
  • Pretty permalinks — informal term for human-readable URL structures (as opposed to /?p=123)

Additional Reading

Last verified: April 2026

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