Deerawan

Hello everyone! In this post, I would like share my experience to customize wordpress URL permalinks in order to get easy indexing of your blog from Google and other search engines. Okay, the default URL in wordpress is something like this http://www.deerawan.com/?p=123. It is horrible, isn’t it? Hmm, so, lets modify it to make it better……for this tutorial, I’m using my wordpress version 2.6.3…. (For images, I highlight the important thing with red rectangle). Here are the steps:

1. Login to your wordpress’s wp-admin
You can access it by typing http://your-domain-name/wp-admin (ex: http://www.deerawan.com/wp-admin) on your favourite browser.

2. Go to Settings option and choose Permalinks
Yes, you can see many options there for customizing your post’s URL. You also see that default format is chosen. Now, you may choose another format that is suited for you. For example, I choose Day and Name format. You can ignore the category base and tag base at the bottom.

Setting - Permalinks Option

3. Modify .htaccess file
You need it to make our customizing works. If your .htaccess file were writable, wordpress could do this automatically, but if not, you need add the mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess file. Say that .htaccess is not writable so we need to find .htaccess first.

4. Find .htaccess file
Go to your cpanel. You can access it by typing http://your-domain-name/cpanel (ex: http://www.deerawan.com/cpanel). Go to File Manager. Check Show Hidden Files option (.htaccess is hidden file). You can find your .htaccess file in your public_html folder of your web hosting. Choose Edit to edit this file. Go to step 5

Choose File Manager

Check Show Hidden Files

Choose Edit

5. Add the mod_rewrite rules
You must already in text editor. Copy the rules below to .htaccess file

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

and choose Save Changes button. See the image below

Insert Mod Rewrite Rules

6. Your URL has been customized, congrats!
You can see the result like this URL post. Note although that your permalinks URL based on post title, you can also modify url name when you create a new post.

Change url

Choose Edit and insert your desired name.

Conclusion
That’s all the explanation about how to change URL permalinks of wordpress. The advantage is your URL is easy to read and easy to be indexed by search engine.