Confused by permalink structure

When you’re talking about static pages, are you taking of pages in wordpress (static posts)?

I’m not sure. In the ‘reading settings’, front page is set to ‘static page’. Very confused by the terminology.
https://www.samlovett.co.uk

Ok. This means that your static pages are listing under the Pages tab?

Correct. I wish to start creating posts but not sure if my permalink stucture is ok.

Ok. Given that your ‘static’ pages are already in WordPress (I was worried you were referring to static pages in that they were straight .html or .php files), changing the permalink structure won’t break those pages; they will simply have a different permalink.

if you want to structure your posts by category and them postname, then you structure would be /%category%/%postname%/ and this should give you simple postname permalinks for your pages, which may be what you already have for them.

The only problem you’d have is if you’ve posted links to your pages outside your site – they would consequently be broken if you change the permalink structure (which might change the permalink for your pages). In this case you can manually redefine the permailnks for your posts by going through each post editor.

I do have a significant number of external links pointing to my existing pages.

If I continue to use the existing /%postname%/ structure, will it have a negative impact as I add more posts?

I have read that blog posts should have a numeric value in their permalink.

What I know about using numeric values in permalinks is that it reduces the chances of clone permalinks to happen. What I’ve generally seen for wordpress blogs is the use of the date (such as the year and perhaps even month) followed by the postname, such as /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/, in order to avoid clone post permalinks should two posts have the same title.

Perhaps what you referring to aswell is the use of the post’s id instead of using the postname, such as /%post_id%/, where you have 0% chance of having two posts with the same permalink since IDs are always unique.

Either way, WordPress will increment the permalink if one’s already used so you never will have an error of two posts using the same permalink. Problem is that having your-post-permalink-2 isn’t the most beautiful name, because of the prefixed 2 at the end (if there’s two posts with the same permalink). That’s why including a temporal variable such as the year or month will reduce the chances that you’ll have two identical permalinks so they all remain as ‘organic’ as possible.

My point:
I’ve checked on my own sites. I use /%category%/%postname%/ for my posts. For my pages, the permalink structure is reduced to /%postname%/ because pages have no categories. So if you switch over to category/postnames, your pages permalinks won’t be affected, so your external links won’t be broken.

Thanks for the info patv… That has cleared up an issue for me. My posts will have a tendency to be timeless and should I need to update the information I will add ‘update’ to the post name.

Thanks again.