The content’s URLs that you publish on your WordPress website are known as permalinks. Permalinks are also among the key parameters of any WordPress website/online store, and something that you should set right away after you launch your shiny new website. You can change your permalinks structure at any time. In this article we’ll cover the best permalinks settings for WooCommerce.

Permalinks Settings

In order to set up permalinks, Open your WordPress admin panel and navigate to WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.

You may have a number of options to choose from and you can even specify a custom structure. The following permalink structures in WordPress should avoid for a good SEO-friendly and user friendly URL:

• Plain – it is the default URL structure of WooCommerce. It is not so much user friendly because both visitor and search engine will not find it easily.
• Day and Name – Though this one and the rest of WooCommerce structure in the list are SEO friendly but not all of them allow you to include keywords. This one is most suitable for your online store with high posting frequency.
• Month and Name – It is same like Day and Name, except it skips the day and thus shorten the URLs by two digits. Just like Day and Name this one is also very suitable for the blogger and also for an online store.
• Numeric – This structure points the ID of the row in your store’s wp_ post table and build a links. It also doesn’t allow you to include keywords. So for good SEO friendly store it is advisable to avoid this one.
• Post Name – It uses the title of your post including keywords. For SEO friendly store this structure is very good because it creates small and clean links.
• Custom structure – This option allow user to create their own URL structure. We strongly recommend to use this one for WooCommerce store owners. If you want to use this, you have to change your common settings to ‘custom structure’ and add “/%category%/%postname%/”. This will add your category slug and post title to your permalink structure.

Product Permalink

Following is the screenshot of Product Permalinks settings for products.

If you are using Permalinks the default settings will be:

yourdomain.com/product/product-name

If you are not using pretty Permalinks the default settings will use your ID based URLs like the following:

yourdomain.com/?product=111

Customizing the Category and Tag Base

For your category base and tag base settings just go at the bottom of the permalink settings page. There you will see optional settings. Category and tags are the default values for these fields.

With the default settings, if you have a category on your website called WordPress, the URL of the WordPress category archives would be yourdomain.com/product-category/category-name.

Likewise, if you have a tag called tag name, the tag archive URL for that tag would be yourdomain.com/product-tag/tag-name.

The Product attribute base slug will optionally use a custom base before /attribute-name/attribute/ (ex: /size/medium or /color/blue).

Changing these fields will allow you to change the URLs that are used for archives. For example, you can change the category base to cat and the tag base to topic.

Always keep in mind that your permalink structure dictates how your website URLs are constructed. You should always review it before you launch your website.

Editorial Team