Deciding on a permalink structure for WordPress

I didn’t even know this was such a big issue.

For this blog I’m not concerned, but this is just my rambling site and not a “real” site. However, for a real site there seem to be all sorts of issues. Apparently things can get yucky if you just use %postname% — at least at some point. Especially if you have a lot of pages (in a situation where I think pages means pages which are different from posts). Some of this gets into WordPress architecture issues that you’d both need to read the WordPress code AND understand the finer points of how databases work. I have to ponder this a bit. For now, this is what I found that seems most relevant.

Here’s where the problem is described:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Using_only_.25postname.25

And some other stuff – though I understand it less and less.

The .htaccess rules WordPress uses:

https://perishablepress.com/press/2006/06/14/the-htaccess-rules-for-all-wordpress-permalinks/

This is why you want to use pretty permalinks for SEO purposes – I get that:

https://www.tomrafteryit.net/boost-search-engine-optimisation-seo-using-permalinks/

and

https://www.homebizpal.com/blogging/wordpress/understanding-wordpress-permalinks/

… and now for the stuff that gets way technical way fast – issues of scaling when the blog gets very big and you don’t start the permalink with a date or post number — which to me seems to be the whole point of pretty permalinks is that you avoid that. Or at least you don’t want to start the permalink with

%category%, %tag%, %postname%, or %author%

So I think that means you either start with the Post ID (which is effectively a number with no meaning to the person reading the site) or you start with some portion of the date and time (which just makes the URL longer).

This is where the thread starts:

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-testers/2009-January/011122.html

And these seem to me to be the most relevant replies (not that I could understand all of them since I don’t have experience with databases, etc.)

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-testers/2009-January/011126.html

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-testers/2009-January/011127.html

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-testers/2009-January/011128.html

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-testers/2009-January/011136.html

https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-testers/2009-January/011139.html

Um. So I chose

https://www.ericshefferman.com/2009/03/08/sample-post/

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/


Which makes it seem like there wasn’t much of a choice. Either a number in the middle of the post that makes no sense or the date which at least seems relevant even though it makes the URL much longer.

Again, I doubt on this blog it will ever matter — but the above stuff makes me think it could be an issue on a high-traffic blog.