One straightforward way to optimize your WordPress website is to ensure that your RUL or permalink structure is written correctly.
The recommendation is for a clean and simple structure with ne of the preferred methods being to put the name of your post at the end of the structure and that will result in one of these structures:
/%postname%/
And the category prefixed in this one:
/%category%/%postname%/
For a better structure, use your primary keyword in the name of your post.
What About Dates?
There aren’t many benefits to using a date in your URL; this just gives your posts a date and, while visitors tend to look for the latest stuff on your site, this could mean that they are missing out on vital information in an older post that is no longer visible.
What About Using a Category?
Providing you have a neat short URL name and your category names are the same, neat and short, you could add one into the permalink structure and this will provide benefits.
However, do make sure that you do not end up with a URL that lengthy; it could lose you value with the search engines and is harder to share. If you do opt for categories, use only one per post
Focus Keywords and Length
It isn’t necessary to have your primary keyword as the first work in your URL, so long as it is in the first three words.
And you shouldn’t make your title any longer than four or five words, otherwise it will start to look unwieldy and messy and won’t give you any extra benefits.
Changing Your URL Structure
If you have been uploading content to your website for a while now, you might not relish the idea of making big changes, like changing your URLS.
If you have been adding dates to your posts then it might not be too good an idea to suddenly stop using them. If, however, you are new to all this website business then using the correct URL structure from the start can only bring you benefit.
And, if you use the older-style URL, ‘urls (?p=) then, yes, you should definitely put the effort in to change them, no matter how much content is on your website. This could be the one reason why Google is struggling to find your pages and display them in the search results.
If you opt to remove dates form your permalink structure, add a .htaccess redirect as follows, to make sure that the old URL will point to the new one:
Apache:
RedirectMatch 301 /d{4}/d{2}/d{2}/(.*) https://xxxx.com/$1
Nginx
location ~ /d{4}/d{2}/d{2}/(.*) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ https://xxxx.com/$1 permanent;
3 }
Do test any changes you make before allowing them to go live.
The Perfect URL for SEO
On the whole permalink structures really won’t be much different form one website to another, so long as they are done the right way.
Do make sure that you set your structure properly before you start writing your posts and, if you do change the structure at any time, don’t forget the redirect!