Permalinks and Pages

  • Resolved mzimmers

    (@mzimmers)


    14 years, 2 months ago

    Hi –

    I recently learned that when pretty permalinks are used, a Page gets a permalink that is essentially a concatenation of the slugs in the page heirarchy leading to that Page. Evidently, there is no way around this.

    From the permalink codex:

    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).

    My site is Page-centric. I was going to enable “fancy” permalinks as part of the installation of Super Cache, but the above caveat has me concerned that the use of textual permalinks will slow down my site.

    Can anyone comment on this? Thanks.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • esmi

    (@esmi)

    14 years, 2 months ago

    Use a custom permalink structure that starts with a numeric – such as /%post_id%/%postname% or the /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ (Month and year) option.

    Pages aren’t affected by the custom structure you choose. They will always use the page name. But using a numeric in your post permalinks means that WP has to do a lot less work to distinguish Pages from Posts – which makes for a faster performing page-centric site.

    Thread Starter mzimmers

    (@mzimmers)

    14 years, 2 months ago

    Hi, Esmi –

    Good to hear from you. In reading your response, I think I may have poorly phrased my question. Let me try again.

    When using default permalinks, everything appears to be numeric. I recognize that this is a good thing for WP performance.

    When using custom permalinks, *even if I begin the post links with a numeric field,* my Page links are still textual. Given that the vast majority of my pages are in fact Pages, does this have serious performance implications? In other words, is the use of custom permalinks a bad idea on a Page-centric site? I probably have over 100 Pages, and intend to add a lot more.

    Thanks.

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    14 years, 2 months ago

    is the use of custom permalinks a bad idea on a Page-centric site

    No – as long as the custom structure starts with a numeric. In other words:

    /%post_id%/%postname%/ = Good
    /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ = Good

    /%category%/%postname%/ = Bad

    Thread Starter mzimmers

    (@mzimmers)

    14 years, 2 months ago

    OK, thanks, Esmi.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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