Custom Permalink WordPress Plugin

29 December 2011 By 2 Comments

Any regular user of WordPress knows that you can customise your URLs under Settings – Permalinks in the control panel.  Here you can indicate to use the post/page title for the pages URL (aka slug) which is more SEO and user friendly. There are still some limitations, particularly when you have sub pages and WordPress insists on including the parent page slug in your URL.  If you have sub-sub-pages etc. the URL then gets very long. (i.e. http://e-business.ie/parent-page/sub-page/sub-sub-page).

I’ve looked and looked for a way to change WordPress or theme settings to avoid these lengthy URLs but it seems the only way around this is using the Custom Permalink WordPress Plugin.  When using this plugin you have complete control over the slugs for pages, posts and category archive pages. Just install the plugin and you will then have more control over editing post/page slugs on the edit screen, in the usual area to do this under the Title.  There will be a new option for this when adding/editing a category.

When using this plugin, you still need to customise the URLs via WordPress’s own Permalink settings, but you will then be able to customise the slugs further via this plugin.

This is particularly handy when you enable the Network function for WordPress using sub-domain.  If your site has been set up for awhile before you do this, it automatically adds “/blog” to your posts to avoid any conflict with the network pages using the subdomain.  If your site is indexed by Google you don’t want all your urls to change suddenly.  You’d need to change each post/page, which could be tedious.

Do you use the Custom Permalink WordPress plugin, or do you use another plugin or technique to control permalinks to the extent that you need?  Please comment here if you have any experience in this area.

Filed Under: WordPress Plugins
About Ann Donnelly

Ann Donnelly is a Partner in O'Mahony Donnelly responsible for Sales, Marketing and Business Development. She came to Ireland after working years in a multinational corporation, where she worked her way from temp to management. Her specialty is getting more business using the internet.

  • oterra

    I have trouble with the Wp permalinks, when I change over from the default setting to custom setting it seems to break some of the links in my website. Is there any way around this?

    • Anonymous

      oterra, if the original urls are already linked to — whether in Google, other sites or if you’ve done manual links in the site yourself — you will have an issue with the urls changing when you set custom permalinks.  Is this what you are talking about?  If so I can give you some recommendations on how to handle this.  If your site is indexed by Google and you are getting decent results, or if you have a lot of good links from external sites, I’d think twice about changing the permalinks.

      If you are only talking about when first setting up a site and you change the permalinks, then go back to the site and the links don’t work — then a refresh/reload of the browser should sort that.