How to Remove the Date From WordPress URLs

So, you want to remove the date from your WordPress post URLs? I get it. Those /2025/08/01/sample-post/ URLs that you get when you set up WordPress are long and not very user-friendly.

The primary reason for removing the date from WordPress URLs is that when you update a post, what should you do? Leave its URL looking old? Move it to the new one, and worry that the links to that post will break?

In this guide, we cover how to change a WordPress permalink, or URL, structure to remove the date from it.

How to Remove the Date From WordPress URLs

Changing the structure of URLs (permalinks) in WordPress is actually very easy. Here’s how to do it:

1. In your WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings->Permalinks
2. Select the permalink structure that will work best for your website or enter a custom structure. In most cases, you’ll want to use Post name.
3. Click Save Changes

That’s it! That’s how easy it is to remove the date from WordPress URLs.

⚠️ But here’s the problem… While it’s this easy to change the structure of your WordPress URLs, it will cause your WordPress site to show 404 errors at your old URLs.

What’s wrong with that? It will tank the SEO of the site you’re working on. All those URLs with dates in them will stop working and Google and search engines will no longer be able to access the content of that page. This will make those pages no longer show in search results.

Of course, if you’re starting a new WordPress site and have no content published yet, then this is not a problem you should worry about. But if your site already has some content that is indexed by search engines, you should take some next steps to ensure that your links will continue working.

Setting Up URL Redirects

To avoid the scenario described above, you’ll want to set up redirects so that your old URL with the date in it now automatically redirects to your new URL without the date in it.

The easiest way to do this is to use a redirection plugin, like Redirection. We have a dedicated guide explaining how to set up 301 redirects with this plugin.

The other trick we’ll cover here to avoid generating 404s on our site: we’ll do our URL rewrites with .htaccess files. Use this method only if you’re comfortable with adding custom code to your site.

WordPress URL rewrite with .htaccess

Here’s a video explaining how I change the permalink structure for a WordPress post, and make sure that I forward all the traffic from the old URLs to the new ones:

Here’s the code, which you’ll typically put in a file called .htaccess which will be at the root of your WordPress site’s file system:

## To change example.com/2019/01/01/post-slug to example.com/post-slug
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ /$4 [R=301,NC,L]
</IfModule>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

The really important thing about this code: it requires that your WordPress server be running “Apache” not “Nginx,” and that your Apache configuration supports .htaccess files for URL rewrites.