I know this is a small thing to many people out there, but I am writing about this for the beginners. I had also faced lot of problem in changing the permalink, when this blog was hosted in Yahoo! server.
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.
To change the permalink structure, first you need to grant permission, to access the .htaccess file(It should be in writable mod). To do that, log into your hosting account using any FTP software...we recommend using "FileZilla". As it is a FREE software and a good featured one and yet so simple to use.
Ask for the host name to your hosting support team or search in their blog. Username and password will usually be the same as the username and password of your hosting account cpanel.
After logging into your Hosting account through “FileZilla”, goto the folder, where you have installed your wordpress theme, select .htaccess and index.php files and then right click and select “File Attributes”..Now change the Numeric value from 644 to 666. This would grant the writing mode to those two files.
And there is a .[dot] in the beginning of the file name .htacess, that file many not be visible. In this case change the settings to show all the files. or you can ask about it to your web host support team.
Now you can simply log into your wordpress account and then click on the “settings” tab, and then click on the Permalinks tab.
There choose which ever format you want your permalink to be.
If you don’t like any of those, then select the “Custom Structure”, as shown in the above image. Now specify whatever structure you want…
Make sure to end your permalink structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.
- %year%
- The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
- %monthnum%
- Month of the year, for example 05
- %day%
- Day of the month, for example 28
- %hour%
- Hour of the day, for example 15
- %minute%
- Minute of the hour, for example 43
- %second%
- Second of the minute, for example 33
- %postname%
- Shows only the post name after your blog URL.
- %post_id%
- The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
- %category%
- A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
- %author%
- A sanitized version of the author name.
Now choose any one of these or the combination’s of these and put it in the “Custom Structure”, and make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% .
Ex:-
/%day%/%postname%/
Now press “Save Changes” button. Thats it. You have setup the permalink structure of your choice. Congrates!
And now don’t forget to change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files to 644 again, for security purpose.
If you still face any problem with this, then it would be better to contact your hosting provoider.
And you may also feel this plugin interesting to redirect the older permalink structure to the new one’s without any hassle.
For more details about this click here.
You could also be interested in reading Permalink contribution for duplicate content.