🔗 URLs, Permalinks And SEO

Every HTML page gets a clean address on your own domain, and search engines see your page exactly as you built it. This article explains how the address is made, which variations work, and how to control what Google shows.

How an address is built:

Every page lives at your site address, then your prefix, then the page's slug:

https://yoursite.com/h/your-page/

• The prefix is set under Settings, URL Settings. The default is h.
• The slug comes from the page title when you first save. Change it with the Edit button next to the Permalink under the title.
• If two pages would get the same slug, WordPress adds a number, such as your-page-2.
• WordPress installed in a subfolder works too. The subfolder simply comes before the prefix.

Copy the address:

On a published page, the green Live URL bar shows the full address with a Copy Link button. In All HTML Pages the URL column shows the address after your domain, with Copy Link next to it. Copy Link changes to Copied! for a moment so you know it worked.

Change the slug:

Click Edit next to Permalink, type the new slug, click OK and then Update. Keep slugs short and readable, such as coaching-plan or holiday-bonus.

Link to a page from your site menu:

1. In WordPress, go to Appearance, Menus.
2. Open Custom Links, paste the page address you copied with Copy Link, and type the menu label, such as Free Guide.
3. Click Add to Menu, then Save Menu.

Your HTML page now opens from your normal site menu, while still showing without your theme.

Pretty permalinks are needed:

Go to Settings, Permalinks in WordPress and choose any option except Plain. The Diagnostics tab shows Pretty permalinks when this is right.

What addresses work:

• The exact page address, with or without the last slash. Without it, visitors are sent to the address with the slash.
• Capital letters in the slug, such as /h/Coaching-Plan/, open the same page.
• The page address with tracking parameters on the end, such as ?source=email. These are fine for your ad and email tracking.
• A single-file page has nothing after its own address, so something like /h/your-page/extra/ is not served. That is why a single file needs full addresses for its images.
• A page uploaded as a ZIP is different: its other files open under the page address, for example /h/spring-challenge/images/hero.svg and /h/spring-challenge/thank-you.html.

Changing the prefix:

Changing the prefix moves every page to a new address, and links to the old addresses stop working. If your pages show Page not found right after a change, go to Settings, Permalinks in WordPress and click Save Changes without changing anything. That refreshes WordPress's address rules. Choose a prefix that is not already the address of a normal page or category on your site.

What visitors and link checkers get:

Published pages always answer with a normal success status, so the link checkers used by email services and social platforms see a working page. Drafts, pending, scheduled and private pages are not shown to visitors. The plugin tells browsers not to cache the page, so visitors always get your latest version. Images, styles and scripts inside a ZIP page may be cached for an hour, which keeps pages fast.

What search engines see:

Search engines see your HTML exactly as you uploaded it.

• The title in search results comes from the title tag in your file. The description comes from your file's meta description tag. Add both to every page.
• Search and social sharing tags added by SEO plugins through your theme do not appear on these pages. Put the tags you want in your HTML head, or in the page's Head Code.
• Social sharing previews come from the preview tags in your HTML head too, such as og:title and og:image.
• The plugin sends a header that allows indexing and following links on published pages.
• Published HTML pages are a public content type, so the WordPress built-in sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml can list them, unless another plugin replaces that sitemap.

Keep a page out of search:

Add this to the page's Head Code, or to the head of your file:

meta name="robots" content="noindex" (inside angle brackets, as a normal meta tag) Major search engines follow the most restrictive instruction they find, so the noindex tag wins. Fernwood Fitness does this on its thank-you page, which only makes sense after a sign-up.

Good prefixes and slugs:

• Prefixes: h, p, go, offer, pages. Short is better, because it appears in every link.
• Slugs: two or three plain words, such as free-guide, coaching-plan or spring-challenge.
• Avoid dates in slugs for pages you will reuse, so the address still makes sense next year.

Sharing on social media:

Social sites build their link preview from the tags in your page's head. Add og:title, og:description and og:image to the file, or put them in the page's Head Code. Fernwood Fitness adds its og:image to the Kickstart page's Head Code, so the share picture can change without editing the file.

Moving your site to a new domain:

Pages keep working after a move as long as the wp-content/fhp-pages/ folder moves with the database. The plugin finds each page's file in its own numbered folder even when the server path changes. After the move, open Diagnostics to check the Storage folder row, then open a few pages.

A real example:

The Coaching Plan page has the title tag The Fernwood Coaching Plan and the meta description Twelve weeks of home workouts with a real coach checking in every week. Those two lines are what Google shows for yoursite.com/h/coaching-plan/.