Wordpress Permalinks Affecting Site Performance

Pixel Pirate · Jun 8, 2011

I cam across a blog post today about wordpress permalinks. It kind of surprised me because it told me the way I use permalinks on all of my blogs is negatively affecting the performance of my website.

I usually use /%postname%/ as the custom structure URL. I see this structure recommended here and in guides and ebooks all the time.

It turns out that this permalink structure is actually hurting your performance.

From wordpress.org:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to have at least two path segments in your post's permalink structure such as /%year%/%postname%/ or even /posts/%postname%/. (Some people recommend /%post_id%/%postname%/ which works for performance reasons but others recommend against it because it is unfriendly to users in the many contexts in which users interact with URLs.) See Otto's technical writeup on the topic as well as this wp-testers discussion.

I now started using /%year%/%postname%/ since it shows users the date of the blog post.

makingfastcash22 · Jun 17, 2011

I was wondering about this as well.. I thought I read somewhere that it might be a good idea to add a .html to the permalinks is this good for seo?

One more thing what about adding a keyword phrase to permalinks is that doable and a good idea?

Wordpress Permalinks Affecting Site Performance

Pixel Pirate

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