Adding to my Custom Permalink

It will change all existing articles. You may want to put dashes or underscores in there between the tokens to make the URLs more readable.

Okay what if I edit the links on the optional section below. I have 1075 articles on my site so there’s no way I can make that many redirects. Is there a way to tag on author and category to my new articles without having to do it manually? Is that what the “optional” section is for below the permalink settings?

You’d do it in the Custom Structure field using these tags:
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_Permalinks

But will changing it make all my previous links give 404 errors? I don’t want to create 301 redirects and I don’t want my site to be giving multiple 404 errors.

no, that’s not what the optional section does. The posts should have “canonical” tags in them, so I don’t think a 301 redirect will be necessary.

Okay, to clarify me adding “/%postname%-%author%-%category%” after my domain on the “Custom Structure” under “Common Settings” won’t require 301 redirects.

Sorry for the back and forth. I’m really not following on what I should and should not do and I don’t want to mess up my site and lose revenue.

Try it on a test site.

Unfortunately, I don’t have another wordless.org test site and the permalink settings are not showing up one of my old free WordPress sites. Is there any ways to test this out or be sure I won’t get 404 error page or have I hit a brick wall and need to redirect all 1075 articles?