In this video, we’re gonna take a look at how to edit your WordPress permalinks. Now, a permalink is simply the structure of your WordPress post and page URL that appears in the browser. To edit your permalinks, simply click on “Settings,” and you’ll see here a link that says “Permalinks” – click on that. And here, you would see that the default permalink for the WordPress blogs you’re using looks something like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=, and the number of the WordPress posts, or page.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/wp-permalinks.swf[/evp]
Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with leaving the permalink as it is by default, but if you want to optimize your blog for search engines and get more free traffic from such search engines, then you have to make your permalinks more search-engine friendly. And the other three options that are listed here by default are actually more search-engine friendly permalink structures.
So let’s select the third one here that will display the month and name. So as you can see here, it would display the year, followed by the month, and then followed by the postname. But generally speaking, the year and the month number are pretty much redundant and it does not help you at all if search engine optimization is what you’re concerned about. So you may want to delete this entire section here and leave only the postname permalink quotes. And then I’m going to scroll to the bottom and click on “Save Changes.”
A-ha! So I get a message from WordPress saying that “you should update your .htaccess now.” Htaccess is basically a file that controls access permissions to your WordPress blog. There are two ways you can edit your htaccess file: No. 1 is using an FTP application, and No. 2, using your cPanel’s File manager function. So I’m gonna show you the first one, which is using FTP. So I will just use my FTP program and connect to my web server, and then I will click to the public_html folder. And here, you can see that it’s a .htaccess file. So what you should do is right-click on this, and select “File Permissions.”
And then you can either check all the boxes here to make it 777, or you could simply type in the number you want, and you’ll automatically update the access permissions. So to edit your permalinks, you need to set this to 777, or in some cases, you’ll be using a slightly different webhost; it could be 755 or 766. But in most cases, you need to set it to 777, and click on “OK.”
Now, you go back to your WordPress permalink settings and your WordPress dashboard, and click on “Save Changes” again. And it says here that “Permalink structure updated.”
The second way to update your htaccess or any other file permission settings is to log in to your cPanel account and click on the File Manager icon here. Make sure you check this option to show hidden files, or dotfiles, and select the Web Root, and this is how the cPanel File Manager would look like. On the left, you would see all the folders – the directory of folders in your web host account; and on the right, you would see all the files in that folder. And you can see the htaccess file over here, so I’m just going to check this option, and at the top, you will see a key icon near this, so use “Change Permissions” – click on that. And very similar to the FTP example that I showed you earlier, you can also check or uncheck the boxes here to control your permission settings, or you can just type in the permission settings here. And when you’re done, just click on “Change Permissions.”