Changing URL is something you shouldn’t do frequently because of SEO. However, there are times you need to change the URL to reflect the content of your pages/posts.
In WordPress, you can choose to include the category in the URL. For example, my permalink structure is:
Then my post URL will container the category. For example, I have an article in the World News category. The URL of that post will be
Now, for example, I would like the change the world-news into breaking-news. How would I do that?
Let me show you how.
How to change the category in your post URL
First, you need to go to Posts->Categories. You will see your category listed there:
As you can see, the category we want to change is World News. If you notice at the right of World News row, there is field called slug. This is what displays in the URL of every posts of that category.
Now, if we want to change world-news to breaking-news, simply change the slug to breaking-news.
Step 1: Click on Quick Edit link under World News
Step 2: Change the slug to breaking-news.
Remember, you don’t need to change the name to Breaking News to update the URL. Changing the slug only is sufficient.
Step 3: Hit the Update Category button
Now, if I view the URL of the post mentioned at the beginning of the article, I can see the new category slug:
So, that’s how you change the category name in the URL. However, it is not recommended to change the URL of any pages/posts frequently because it will take time for search engines to update your new URL. After changing the URL, you also should do a redirect from the old url to the new URL to make sure when the visitors go to the old URL, they will get redirected to the new URL, not a 404 page.