4.1 Conclusion

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts+ course on WordPress permalinks. In this part of the course, I'm going to wrap up and summarize what you've learned as you followed along with this course. So this course aims to teach you everything you need to know to understand WordPress permalinks and to optimize them both for search engine optimization and for user experience. So we started off by identifying what permalinks are and looking at the difference between a permalink, a slug, and a URL. And this helped understand why you optimize each of those different sections and what the role of each of them is. We then moved on to looking at why it's important to optimize your slugs and URLs. So we looked at SEO for permalinks and URLs and how they can help you get better search engine rankings. And then we examined why user experience can be impacted by your URLs and why it's important to have short meaningful URLs so that people can remember them. We then went on to look at how you can change the permalink settings in your site. So we use the permalink settings screen to look at the different kinds of settings that you have for permalinks and to activate the one that's the most SEO and UX friendly, which is pretty permalinks. And here we've just used post names. And we also looked at how you can change the category base and tag base and we changed category which is the default to topic. Having looked at the permalink settings and set up pretty permalinks, the next step is to optimize your slugs. And I showed you how to optimize the slug for an individual blog post to make it shorter and better for SEO and user experience. And we also looked at how you can optimize the category slugs and you can change from the automatically generated ones to shorter category slugs of your choice, which again target your keywords. So we then ended up with a category topic of websites where it would have been websites and newsletters to start with. Finally, we examined the potential impacts of changing your slugs and even your permalinks settings on a site that's been in existence for a while and on posts which are new. And looked at why you should set up redirection in your site for any posts where you change the slug once that post might have been shared by people outside your site. And I discussed how important it is to optimize your slugs when you first publish your site. So now you've watched this course, you should have a better understanding of slugs and permalinks in WordPress, why you should optimize them for SEO and UX, and exactly how to do it. I hope you found this course useful, thanks for watching.