I need help with permalinks

Hi folks!

I'm building a site that is going few levels deep in terms of silos.

So, for example: mysite.com/europe/france/paris

I'm currently encountering an issue with the link structure. Since I'll have multiple destinations and I don't want the URLs to be overly optimized with keywords, I wanted to have a link structure like this:

• mysite.com/europe/france/when-to-travel/article-title/
• mysite.com/europe/greece/when-to-travel/article-title/

...but Wordpress is not allowing me to do this. When I try to add a child category under Greece named the same as the one under France, it automatically changes the slug to something like "when-to-travel-2". I can't understand why this is happening, since the URL paths are different for each silo.

What do I need to do to be able to make it possible to have same child silo slugs under different parent silos?

Any help is greatly appreicated!

Fahimujjaman said:

WordPress treats category slugs globally, not hierarchically — so even if under different parent categories, it won't allow duplicate slugs like /when-to-travel.

Solution:​

Use custom post types with custom rewrite rules or a plugin like "Custom Post Type UI" + "Permalink Manager Lite" to:

1. Allow duplicate slugs under different parent terms.
2. Customize your URLs to look like:
   • /europe/france/when-to-travel/article-title/
   • /europe/greece/when-to-travel/article-title/

Or, if sticking with categories:​

Use a plugin like Permalink Manager Lite:

• It overrides default WordPress behavior.
• You can manually set slugs and paths, even if they are duplicates under different parents.

Click to expand...

Hi bro,

Thanks for your input. The second option seems way more appealing.

SEO-wise, it's not harmful, right?

Need help allowing duplicate slugs in separate parent silos.

You can safely use Permalink Manager Pro to achieve exactly that; duplicate child slugs under different parent categories.
I use it on complex silo setups and never had SEO issues. Just make sure canonical URLs are properly set.
If you want, I can upload it for you here for free.

WordPress requires unique category slugs. Use Permalink Manager Pro to allow duplicate slugs like when-to-travel under different parents (e.g., mysite.com/europe/france/when-to-travel/). Install, enable duplicate slug support, set slugs, and flush permalinks.

As long as it is consistent across your site, the traditional silo structure is not as important as it used to be.

My speculation is it is probably a better idea to follow Wordpress conventional URL structures for bigger sites since Google would probably have decades of experience on crawling WP sites.

I have a Woocommerce site that I A/B tested with /categories/{brands} vs just /{brand} and honestly the difference is quite marginal, if any at all.

What's more important is how you structure your menu + footer or even onpage links in a way that users that navigate easier to different pages.

This happens because WordPress treats category slugs globally, not hierarchically. To fix it, try using a plugin like “Custom Permalinks” or use custom post types with manual routing. You can also rewrite URLs via .htaccess or use filters in functions.php.