WordPress Page Slug, Where’d It Go?

I hear a lot of complaints about the new version of WordPress. Myself, I think it’s great. There have been a couple of things that have stopped me in my tracks wondering where the heck they were. For example…the page slug. The post slug is fine, it works, but the page slug for some reason is MIA. I figured out a work around though so I’ll share it with ya. Until the kind people that are creating WordPress and giving it away at no charge fix the problem, I’ll happily perform the couple extra steps it takes to change the page slug.

On posts, you’ll see the post slug come up a couple seconds after creating a Title for your post. It seems that once a Draft is auto saved, it will create the slug, or “permalink”. By default, the permalink will be the exact title of your post replacing any of the spaces with hyphens and removing any special characters. After it is created you can click the edit link to make any changes to a more SEO-friendly slug. Remember though, if editing it after it has been published, do so quickly. If a search engine crawls your site after you publish it and before changing it, there will be a missing page in its index.

You would think page slugs would work the same as post slugs. For me though, and some others out there, it doesn’t. For me, the only way to see the permalink for a page is after publishing the page. So I have to come back in Manage, Page and edit the slug…or permalink, which is what they seem to rather call it now. That’s it, the crafty work around, not that slick, but it works. As mentioned above you have to edit it quickly before any search engines come crawling around. What I do though is, title the page with the slug in mind and then instead of editing the slug afterwards, I edit the title. Cause you know… those search engine spiders are fast! :)

Oh ya, one more thing. I haven’t seen this for myself, but it makes sense, I read that you won’t be able to edit the permalink at all if you haven’t changed your permalink structure. But I’m guessing that if you are changing your permalinks on a per-page or per-post basis you would have already adjusted the permalink structure. If not, head over to Settings, Permalinks.