If you’re on an Apache host, you most likely have mod rewrite, and you most likely already have an htaccess file, in my experience.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your htaccess file is writable, and this can be done with your FTP software or your file manager inside your web hosting control.

Many web hosts block the visibility of your htaccess, so be sure to choose to show hidden files inside your FTP software or inside your web hosting control panel.

Make note of the original settings, then set the htaccess to 777, which should enable the WordPress admin control panel to do the rest.

Login to your WordPress admin control panel – options – permalinks

From there go to the custom option, and paste the following into the field -

/%category%/%postname%/

That will give you your category and post title for the end of your URL. I’ve been experimenting lately with just using /%postname%/ too, and if your blog is very niche, and you don’t want to to categorize your URLs, there’s no reason you can’t do that.

At that point, you should see this message appear the top -

You’re done!

Check your post for friendly URL’s and change your .htaccess back the way it was, and you’re good to go.

*disclaimer – We will not accept any liability if you do it incorrectly and it does not work, or you get hacked because you leave something writable, or you basically screw thiongs up. Just set your permalinks back to default, and all will be fine.

The original post is titled Permalinks – Change Defaults , and it came from Get WordPressed .

Once you have an established URL structure, a change can cause you to not only lose search engine visibility, but all of your PageRank will drop to zero, and all of your inbound links will no longer work. That can’t be good!

Additionally, if all of the page names in the search engines index cease to exist, then anyone that ever clicks on one of your Serps would be taken to a 404 error. That’s bad!

Sometimes there’s a lot of legitimate reason to want to change, usually because they were set up in correctly in the first place. The proper way to make change would be to implement real one redirects for every single URL that’s changing. This can be quite the daunting task.

Luckily there is a plug-in available to make this process painless. It’s called Dean’s Permalinks Migration, and here’s a three-minute video to show you how it works…

The original post is titled Safely & Easily Change Permalinks , and it came from Get WordPressed .