Enabling Permalinks in Wordpress

What are permalinks?

Permalinks are a feature of WordPress that makes the links on your site look more natural to humans. For example, instead of a link to a blog post, look like:

• http://www.example.com/?p=491

You can make it look like this:

• http://www.example.com/blog/what-are-permalinks

This not only makes it easier to read but also has SEO benefits. For the purpose of this article, our primary concern is enabling Permalinks for the WooCommerce API to work.

Changing your permalink settings

You can change your permalink settings in the administration section of your WordPress site. 

1. To get to the settings page, click Settings on the left menu 
2. Click Permalinks. 

Alternatively, you can access the page directly by going to:

• http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

Once you get there, you'll see a page that looks like this:

On the settings page, you'll see several different formats of links. By default, the Plain setting is selected - this means permalinks are disabled.

For the WooCommerce API, it doesn't matter which option you choose, as long as it's not the first one. For simplicity's sake, we recommend choosing Day and name. 

3. Once you make the selection, don't forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page to click Save Changes.

Testing your permalinks

Once you've saved the settings, go to the homepage of your WordPress site (reload the page if you were already there) and click on a link to one of your blog posts. If everything is working, you'll notice that the URL to the post is in the format that you choose in the settings.

Troubleshooting

In most cases, everything will work right away, but some hosting providers require changing some server settings for the permalinks to work. If you're not seeing the new URL structure, or you're not able to view the pages at the new URLs, this might be the case.

A good resource for doing this is the WordPress site which has a page on how to configure your server for permalinks.