By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them; however, WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.
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A note about performance: Permalink structures beginning with %category%, %tag%, %author%, or %postname%, require more server resources to resolve than structures such as, Day and Name, Month and Name, and %post_id%-%postname%, though as of 3.3 the %postname% structure is usable.
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Customize Permalink Structure
Common settings
Check one of the radio buttons corresponding to the correct Permalink Structure for your blog.
Default
An example of the default structure is http://www.sample.com/?p=123
Day and name
An example of the day and name based structure is http://www.sample.com/2008/03/31/sample-post/
Month and name
An example of the month and name based structure is http://www.sample.com/2008/03/sample-post/
Numeric
An example of the numeric structure is http://www.sample.com/archives/123
Post name
An example of the post name structure is http://www.sample.com/sample-post
Custom structure
In the box specify the custom structure you desire to use. One example is /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. Look at the Using Permalinks article for further discussion of Permalink Structure Tags.
