How to Change the WordPress Default Permalinks for Pages

WordPress permalinks are not nearly as flexible as I would like them to be. It offers the ability to easily change the Post permalink structure, as well as the category and tag structure, but that’s where it ends.

You have the option of using a plugin like Custom Permalinks, if you want the ability to quickly change the permalink of any term (Tag, Category, Page, etc).

However, WordPress doesn’t offer the ability to change the Page permalink structure.

After reading hundreds of posts, support threads, and articles about $wp_rewrite, I finally developed the code that worked.

The Code

By default, WordPress uses this as the Page permalink structure: /%pagename%

But let’s say you wanted to make it /page/%pagename%/ or /%pagename%.html or something of that variation.

In this example, we will change the permalink structure to be something like this: /page/credits.html (credits being the page slug)

Put this code in your functions.php file.

add_action( 'init', 'custom_page_rules' );
function custom_page_rules() {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$wp_rewrite->page_structure = $wp_rewrite->root . 'page/%pagename%.html';
}

If you want to change it to be just /credits.html, you could use something like '%pagename%.html' and so on, and so on.

The few lines of code should be flexible enough to tweak and make your own.

If you have any feedback or questions about, would be happy to hear about it in the comments.