Most websites or blogs built with WordPress today use permalians. Fortunately, WordPress is intuitive and offers some tools to configure them quickly and easily … But what do you really know about them? What is a permalian? How are they built? This is what we will see in this article.
What is a permalian?
A permalian is, as its name suggests, A permanent link to an article or a specific page Who will not change And will not be destroyed, Even if the link is broken. By default, a permalian on WordPress looks like this:
https://www.example.com/?p=14
It is the “permanent link” to a particular article on your site. He will always be there until you delete it. Obviously, you must replace 14 with the ID of your article and example.com with your domain name.
A permalian is supposed to be permanent because he always points to a specific content element, without ever changing. While the home page and the different archive pages change as new content is published, The permalian always gives access to the article or the page defined in his body. These links are managed in different ways and, certain CMS, have a time time for their permalian, so that when the page is modified, the permalian always refers to the right version, at the time of the creation of the link.
However, http://www.example.com/?p=14 is not what could be called “readable by man” because, unless you know your entire articles database and the ID associated with each of them, you cannot interpret what it means, except that it points to an article in this area. WordPress therefore offers a solution in the form of “pretty” URL which can be easily interpreted by an ordinary human.
Permalians and slugs
The slug of an article is the very last part of the URL of an article. If you have configured the parameters of WordPress permalians so that the name of the article is used, the slug of an article entitled “How to create pretty permalians” will be automatically generated as follows: yoursite.com/comment-creer-de-jolis-permaliens/. It's a good slug. He tells users what the article is talking about and, for search engines, it contains “pretty permalians”, which may be the keyword you are targeting. But, it can still be improved.
Your slugs must be long enough to include the keywords you target, but short enough to be memorizable for users and do not confuse search engines with unnecessary words.
Thus, an article entitled “How to create pretty permalians” would be better accompanied by a pretty jolis-permaliens, which would give yoursite.com/jolis-permaliens/. Or, if you have several articles on pretty permalians and want to give it a specific slug linked to the fact that this is a practical guide, you can use Create- Jolis-Permaliens, which gives you yourrsite.com/créer-jolis-permalians.
Permalians and UX
The use of pretty permalians and Short slugs And memorable will also bring you benefits in terms of ergonomics. According to an article published in 1999 by Jacob Nielsen, a Website with a good UX requires:
- An easy to memorize domain name.
- Short URLs.
- Easy to type URLs.
- URLs that allow you to view the structure of the site.
- URLs that don't change.
An URL should never changebecause it can be stored And shared of many ways. This is the reason why we call them permalian. In addition, an URL must be semantic, that is to say having an immediate and intuitive meaning for non-expert users.
Thus, if it is possible to modify the permalian of an article after having published itThis is not a good idea. Indeed, the original permalian may have already been shared. If you have to modify it, be sure to follow good practices in this area.
Permalians in WordPress
WordPress offer it Possibility to choose A style of Permalian adapted to your blogcontaining different variables in a standard arrangement. As we mentioned earlier, WordPress permalians are, by default, at http://www.example.com/?p=14, but it is easy to modify them. We will see How to do it, what type to use and why use it.
Difference between permalians and dynamic links
A permalian is a static linkwhich means that its URL address remains unchanged over time. Even if modifications are made to the content of the page they identify, these links retain their name and structure. For example, on www.votresite.com/blog.html, The URL will remain unchanged Even if you change the contents of the blog home page.
On the other hand, A dynamic link contains variable parameters. The links generated dynamically are generally created by scripts who have the ability to create database queries. Another difference is that these links tend to be longer than permanent links. In some cases, the URL address will be so long that it will be cut in the search results and will send a 404 error if a user tries to open the page by copying and tighting the address of the link. In addition, and unlike permanent linksdynamic links often include non -alphanumeric characterssuch as %, &,? or +.
Creation of a permalian format
In your WordPress dashboardyou can Choose one of the four permalian structures standard. The first is the default structure we have already talked about, http://www.example.com/?p=14and should probably be changed if you wish.
Then there are Five other permalian structures that you can use:
- The structure “Date and title” where the permalian will include the date of the article as well as its title => https://www.exemple.com/14-09-2021/title-article
- The structure “Month and title” Where the permalian will only include the month, year and title of the article => https://www.exemple.com/09-2021/title-article
- The “digital” structure where the permalian will look like => https://www.exemple.com/archives/123/
- The structure With the title of publication => https://www.exemple.com/titre-article
- And finally, there is the personalized structurewhere you can add the name of the article, the author, the category, but also the time and the date.
WordPress permalians don't work? Troubleshooting of current problems
Most of the time, your WordPress permalians work well and you don't need to think about it after defining them. However, it sometimes happens that things do not go as planned, which can cause problems with your permalians who do not work and can therefore generate a 404 error.
If this happens on your site, you can usually resolve the problem in regenerating THE .htaccess file of your site. When you configure your permalians, WordPress adds these rules to the .htaccess file of your server. If something is wrong in this file, the origin of the problem is surely in there.
Fortunately, he is Easy to force WordPress to generate a New .htaccess file. To do this, simply return to the parameters → Permalians and click on Save the modifications. Exactly – no need to make changes – just click on the button to save the changes already in progress.
