Set up permalinks for SEO ranking

A permalink is the web address of one particular page — the part after your domain name. In yourdomain.com/blog/spring-opening-hours, the permalink is /blog/spring-opening-hours.

Clear, readable addresses help you rank on Google and make a website look professional and trustworthy. /recipes/lemon-tart tells a visitor exactly where they are. /page-id-40718 tells them nothing.

Two different things

These get muddled constantly, so it is worth separating them before you start.

Think of the structure as your house style for addresses, and a custom permalink as the exception you make when one page deserves special treatment.

Setting the structure for blog posts

/{blog}/{name}

That is it. Every post you write from now on gets its address built for you.

The shortcodes

The shortcodes you see are generated from your own setup, so your list will not match anyone else’s.

• Your asset slug becomes a shortcode. Slug blog gives you {blog}. Slug article gives you {article}.
• Every category type you add gives you one. A Categories taxonomy gives you {field.categories}. Add Tags as well and you also get {field.tags}.

Some patterns and what they produce:

Shorter is usually better. /blog/spring-opening-hours is easier to read aloud, easier to type, and easier to remember than a four-level address.

Doing the same for a custom asset

Custom assets work identically. Say you have built one called Recipes:

Your shortcodes follow the same rule. Asset slug recipes gives {recipes}. A Cuisines category gives {field.cuisine}, so /{recipes}/{field.cuisine}/{name} produces /recipes/italian/lemon-tart.

See Custom fields for building custom assets.

Overriding one post

Once a structure is set, addresses are generated automatically, and that is what you want almost all of the time.

Occasionally one post deserves its own address. Type the address you want into the Permalink field on that post and click Update. It overrides the pattern for that post only, and everything else carries on as normal.

A real example. Your usual pattern gives /news/offers/winter-deal. For a campaign you want something punchier to print on a flyer, so you set that one post to /winter-deal-2026. Every other post keeps the house pattern.

Pages work differently

Pages have no structure setting. There is no pattern to apply, because pages are all different from one another.

Pages do accept custom permalinks. Click the page name and type the address into the Permalink field.

That turns out to be more useful than it sounds. Three things people use it for:

Grouping pages into folders

If you offer several services with a page each, give them all addresses beginning /services/:

/services/wedding-cakes
/services/birthday-cakes
/services/corporate-orders

Nothing physically moves. The addresses simply read as though the pages are grouped, which helps both visitors and search engines understand how your website is organised.

Pages for particular places

If you serve several towns, a page for each with an address naming the place helps you appear in local searches, even without a shop in that town:

/services/kent/canterbury
/services/kent/whitstable

Addresses for advertising

If you run ads, an address containing the words people searched for reads better in the advert and in the results:

/wedding-cakes/free-consultation

Getting it right first time

Decide the structure before you publish. Changing it later means changing every address on your website at once.

Use words, not numbers. /{name} beats /{id} every time for anyone reading it.

Use hyphens between words. spring-opening-hours, not spring_opening_hours or springopeninghours.

Keep it lower case and leave out accents and punctuation.

Leave dates out unless you need them. /2026/05/20/spring-opening-hours quietly tells every visitor how old the article is, which makes useful older articles look stale.