Date in permalinks. Bad?

[Rich-DC]

Hello!

I have a recipe website with over 1000 posts. Currently I have the month and year in the permalink that everyone is hinting off to me is bad. On the same front people tell me if I change the permalinks to just the post name it's going to significantly slow down my site.

I'm torn on this one about changing. From Google's standpoint is it better to change to the post name and if so should I be fearing I'm going to run into trouble with the change?

Any suggestions you have would be appreciated.

Thanks!!!

[c_estep_tcbguy]

I'm assuming the permalink is the domain.com/blog/year/month/date/postname type structure, the Wordpress default? Going from so many unnecessary folders to fewer seems like it can only speed things up a bit.

I'd recommend a structure such as domain.com/recipes/�tegory%/%postname%/ if you have them categorized by types of meal. Google likes to see a logical folder structure. Makes for solid human readability as well.

And don't forget to redirect old permalinks to new permalinks. If there are any posts linked out there, you'll want to be sure they redirect to the new permalink.

[Rich-DC]

Thank you for this info. I've been going back on forth in removing the dates probably for at least a year now. Always concerned about performance but I know that leaving the dates in there is just bad. We're going to give it a shot and see what happens. People keep telling me with as many posts that I have the concern is performance but maybe this is just bad info. Thanks!

[baskingrock]

The problem is that it dates your posts, so your click-through & time on page could be negatively impacted if the audience believes it's outdated information.

My advice is to make the change and check the performance speed after. I believe that Wordpress has addressed this issue anyway with this update. If you are worried you can add a post ID to the post name tag, but I personally wouldn't be worried about it. If performance is truly that bad you can always go back.