In the following simple solution, I cover the process of removing the (year, month, day) date from WordPress day and name based permalinks (post urls). There was a time when many professional bloggers recommended using a day and name based permalink structure. However, for present day SEO, many bloggers now recommend using simple name based or category and name based permalinks.
It is easy to change the permalink stucture itself in WordPress, but once this is done, any incoming links will need to be redirected to the new permalinks by use of a rewrite rule or you may risk losing your inbound traffic to the old permalinks or worse yet, lose previous page rank and index placement for those posts.
How to Remove the Post Date from Permalink urls
- Login to your WordPress Admin panel
- Navigate to Settings > Permalinks
- Check the option to use a Custom Structure, enter /%postname%/ and then Save Changes
- Using an FTP client, copy the .htaccess file from your domains directory on the server to your computer
- If WordPress is installed in the Root directory (http://yoursite.com), open the .htaccess file and, just before # Begin WordPress, insert the following code*:
- If WordPress is installed in a subdirectory (http://yoursite.com/wordpress), open the .htaccess file and, just before # Begin WordPress, insert the following code*:
RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://yoursite.com/$1
RedirectMatch permanent /wordpress/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://yoursite.com/wordpress/$1
* Replace yoursite.com with your domain name and wordpress with the subdirectory name if applicable.