As a WordPress blogger, you know the important of WordPress permalink structure for SEO optimization, but do you know that optimize permalink for SEO may harm your performance of the web blog? In this article, I want to talk about this small problem.
I don’t care about this problem until Google announced that the website performance will be one factor of SEO ranking (Using site speed in web search ranking) so that, I (and maybe many of you) set the website permalink structure to:
- %postname%
- %postname%.html
- %category%/%postname%
- %category%/%postname%.html
…
Of course, this permalink structure is very good for SEO, there’re many articles were talking about this so I don’t want to re-mention, but we has forget about this:
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 start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
So, what the permalink structure will you set after reading this post for reconcile SEO and performance?
I think about some of these:
- %year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.html (I don’t like this because many visitor can think the article was so old and they will visit the other website)
- %post_id%-%postname%.html (What’s about this?)
- or %post_id%/%postname%.html
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But I think the SEO we get with permalinks is of much more importance than the time factor.
correct,google like the html struction. of course, like google said, a good webhoster is very important. because this is realed if the reader can see your website smoothly.
I would choose the SEO benefits of setting permalink structure to cat/post any day. Website performance (which I understand can influence your search engine ranking) is for the most part insignificant to your readers, it’s never going to be so bad that the page doesn’t load.
It’s a nice idea :)
Hi Jennifer.. I prefer a structured permalinks than the performance. I don’t think it will slow down the site so much.
Questions: Is this blog have only 4 categories? (Articles, WordPress, Design, tutorial). I just want to know how you removed the “/category/” from the URL.
Jenni, yes I noticed permalinks with %%%.. As for me, I don’t like to open such links unless of course if I am a regular visitor of that site. Great post! Good job on this