Hi!
Just taking MMS for a spin, and on first load it says my permalinks seem to be plain, and these don’t work well with a static site, and could I consider changing them?
The problem is that if I change them to anything other than plain, some of the page-links then give 404s, so presumably MMS won’t be able to crate static versions of them anyway. Is there something else i should be doing?
Thanks!
Hi,
When you have permalinks set to “plain”, then typically the uniqueness of each post URL is defined by the URL’s query string, so for example “?post_id=xxx”. This is generally a problem for static sites which do not include the query string in the resulting static file name. (it can also be an issue for search engines that can’t properly interpret the query string as a part of a unique URL)
Bottom line is that for sites to function statically or to be indexed reliably by crawlers, you really want page links that don’t rely on a query string component for uniqueness.
If you use WordPress to provide links between pages, it will typically link to the “page” and generate an appropriate page URL when you request the page. In this instance switching structures should work Ok. If on the other hand you have inserted links within pages yourself that contain page references of the form “/index.html?post_id=xxxx”, then these will likely break if you try to change the structure, which will be a problem.
The solution in this case is to let WordPress provide the links between pages and not to insert them statically yourself. (OR, to insert them “after” you have decided on and chosen the ultimate permalink structure you intend to publish)
If you have a site with a plain structure, you might want to check out how search engines view the site and which pages it’s been able to reliably index. If you’re not sure how to do this, try googling “search console” and take a look at “google search console tools”.
hth