How to show percentage sign in wordpress permalinks?

[rahul11]

I am working on a client site which is based on deals and offers. Most of the titles are like “50% OFF on Nike Sneakers” or “Get 20% OFF on motorola cases” etc. The problem is that after we post the offers, the permalink comes as - www.example.com/50-off-on-nike-sneakers/

I believe that it will damage the SEO part because when I ran SEO test I found an error which says - Bad value ‘’. A URL cannot be empty. http://example.com/50-off-on-nike-sneakers/

What can I do to fix that error? Is it due to that percentage sign missing in the permalink?

Thanks…

[bluedreamer]

Why not write your URL title manually, eg /50-percent-off-sneakers

[Gandalf]

The % sign has a special meaning in a URL - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding %25 would give the percent sign.

[WebMachine]

WordPress uses URL friendly slugs in their permalinks, which means only lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens to connect the words. They do not allow symbols because many of them are not safe to use in URLs. (see article (Please) Stop Using Unsafe Characters in URLs). In this article, they refer to the % sign - "The character “%” is unsafe because it is used for encodings of other characters. "

There are ways to get around this, but to be safe, I would go with @bluedreamer’s suggestion.

[rahul11]

Thanks @bluedreamer and @WebMachine I will start using “Percent” in the titles from now on.