There may be times when you want to group some of your WordPress pages and posts together. You can make a parent page or a category and assign these pages and posts to them.
However, creating new parent pages or category archive pages might take you a lot of time and effort. You need to prepare the content, choose the design or layout, optimize it for mobile, and so on. Why don’t you create a custom permalink structure which works as a parent page for these specific pages and posts?
In this article, we explain what custom permalink structure, also known as custom URL structure is and discuss 3 reasons why you need to create one.
What is custom permalink structure?
Permalinks refer to the entire URLs of individual pages, posts, or archive pages. There are 2 main parts in your page URLs: the website domain and slugs.
WordPress allows you to use post titles as the slugs. You can also include the day, month, category, or even custom text in your URLs. This section will be placed between the site domain and post name. Here is a custom permalink structure example: https://mysite.com/custom-text/my-example-post/.
- https://mysite.com: your site domain
- /custom-text/my-example-post/: your post’s slug
- /custom-text/: custom tags. You can choose tags available in WordPress Permalink Settings such as day, month, year. It’s possible for you to create your own tags.
- /my-example-post/: the post name
However, this custom permalink structure will apply to all pages and posts on your site. In other words, each of your page URLs will start with https://mysite.com/custom-text/.
2 Ways to create custom URL structure for certain pages & posts
There are 2 ways for you to organize your content and make page URLs more meaningful to users. You can either create parent pages and categories or generate a custom permalink structure for specific pages and posts.
#1 Create parent pages or categories
You can create a new parent page or category and assign posts or sub-pages to them.
This method may not an ideal solution in case you don’t want to create a new parent page or a category archive page.
On top of that, categories and tags just apply to posts while parent pages are only added to sub-pages by default. Grouping both pages and posts together, such as adding categories to pages or adding parent pages to posts has never been easy. You need to write code or seek help from plugins.
#2 Create custom URL structure for certain pages & posts only
Unlike from WordPress Custom Permalink Structure, you can create the custom URL structure for some specific pages and posts only. The text between the website domain and the post name works as a parent or a category tag.
However, this “parent” is not a page on its own. As a result, users will be redirected to a 404 not found page when attempting to access it.
Why creating custom URL structures
There are 3 common reasons for customizing URL structures for certain pages and posts without adding parent pages, categories, or tags. You can organize your content better and create meaningful page URLs, improve the website SEO rankings, and recognize important content easily.
#1 Organize your content better and create meaningful URLs
It’s a waste of time to create a parent page or a category that includes several child pages or posts only. Take author pages as an example. You have only 1 or 2 writers providing content for your site. It wouldn’t be ideal to create an author archive page https://mysite.com/author.
Once creating a custom permalink structure, getting related pages and posts together becomes much simpler. As a result, your visitors will see https://mysite.com/authour/alice or https://mysite.com/authour/siena.
On top of that, the custom permalink structure makes your URLs more meaningful. Without /author/, the https://mysite.com/alice link would make no sense.
#2 Recognize important content easily
Creating custom URLs structure for specific pages and posts also proves convenient for you to recognize your content.
You’re working on a content improvement project, for instance. You need to extract all links from your website and put them in a Google sheet to go over one by one and make sure you don’t miss any page. There are more than 100 pages from your site. So how do you find which are the most vital pages to start?
Just add custom text /featured/, for example, to important pages. Once placing this word between the domain and the slugs of certain pages or posts, you can quickly find your most important content among a long list of blog post URLs in the Google sheet.
#3 Create SEO friendly URLs
Generating custom URL structures brings SEO benefits to your site too. The text between the domain and post slugs can be an important keyword to target. For example, https://mysite.com/seo/how-to-create-perfect-slug or https://mysite.com/seo/how-to-write-compelling-meta-tag.
Since there are only a few posts, it’s not necessary to create a category and assign posts to it. You may also find it hard to add the keyword “seo” directly to the post name.
Make use of custom URL structures!
Creating custom permalinks for certain pages and posts come in useful in many cases. You can easily organize your content without building parent pages or categories. Page URLs with custom permalink will be more meaningful to users. It also helps improve your site SEO.
If you have any questions about what custom permalink structure for certain pages and posts is as well as its benefits, let us know in the comment section below!
