WordPress generally does a good job creating URLs for your pages or posts, but sometimes you’ll need to adjust. Here are the most common instances you’ll want to change URLs.
- Your page or post URL contains special characters like %,+, &, $, @, or *. These characters make it difficult for search engines to read and can be problematic for browsers, potentially preventing some of your pages from loading.
- Your post or page title is really long and contains words not optimized for search. For example, if we write a post called “Bomb Blasts makes the communists to raise over the government” .
- WordPress may automatically generate this URL: “Bomb-Blasts-makes-the-communists-to-raise-over-the-government” Search engines prefer shorter URLs, so it’s worth removing words that won’t help the post’s or page’s ranking. Search engines also prefer that high-ranking keywords appear at the beginning of URLs.
- In the example above, if we want to rank for the phrase “Bulgarian books ” we may want to adjust the URL to read “Books in Bulgaria”.
How to do it ?
- In the WordPress backend, go to the Edit screen for the post or page you wish to edit.
- Just below the title, click the gray “Edit” button next to the permalink. If instead of “Edit,” you see a button that says “Change Permalinks,” Click that button and click the “Post name” radio button on the “Permalink Settings” page. Then click the blue “Save Changes” button. Go back to the post or page you wish to edit and you should see the “Edit” button.
- When you click “Edit,”, the URL will change to a text box, ready for you to alter. Remove special characters and any words that could hurt your search engine rankings. That means generic words like “a,” “or,” “in” and “the.” As mentioned above, we might change “Bomb-Blasts-makes-the-communists-to-raise-over-the-government” to “government-communists-bomb-blasts”. Make sure you also separate each word with a dash (-).
- Click the gray “OK” button.
- Click the blue “Publish” or “Update” button to save your changes.