Perhaps my WordPress update didn’t go as smoothly as I’d initially thought… Somehow, my permalinks changed of their own accord! I had always had them as a custom one of “%postname%-%post_id%.htm”, and hadn’t even noticed that my post permalinks suddenly were in the form of “/%postname%/”.

Luckily, I have a 404-Error monitor plugin installed, and quickly discovered that all of a sudden my site was generating an enormous amount of 404 (page not found) errors! Upon looking at the list of URLs that were suddenly “not found” and recognizing them as some of my most visited posts’ Permalinks, I immediately went and scanned my blog and noticed in Settings|Permalinks that my site was no longer configured with my custom pretty permalinks!

I obviously immediately switched it back to the correct configuration so that my permalinks are now working properly, but find it odd that this could have happened in the first place. I googled “permalinks Changed after update Wordpress 3.5.2”, and only came across one other person who had this problem – and somehow their problem resolved itself on its own (?). Instead, I came across a lot of people who were having problems logging into their WordPress site after updating to 3.5.2, so I guess it’s still a good idea to be a little nervous before doing this update… However, because of the security fixes that are built into it, updating your copy of WordPress really is a necessity. Good luck and let me know if you have any problems updating WordPress on your end!! I’m especially curious to see if anyone else experienced the permalinks problem that I did. Seriously, how could my permalinks structure have been changed on its own? Not sure that this was caused by my update to WordPress 3.5.2, but it certainly is suspicious…

On an ironic note, I have been considering switching to /%postname%/ simply because the shorter the URL is, the better for SEO purposes. Obviously, if I do decide to go that route I will have to set up 301 redirects from all of the old URLs from my blog to the new ones (a pain in the butt, which is why I haven’t gone ahead and done it yet). My initial reasoning for choosing the permalink structure I did was I had read that if you include the %post_id% in the permalink, which is guaranteed to be unique while the %postname% is not, that the database would find the pages faster… Perhaps the universe is trying to tell me its time to change my permalink structure..

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