URL's: WordPress vs Wikipedia

I’m still toying with the idea of incorporating my websites into a CMS. One major consideration is URL’s. I have thousands of web pages (matching URL’s stored in a database), and they follow WIkipedia’s format (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge).

That URL would look like this on one of my sites:

MySite/Topics/Battle_of_the_Bulge

But this is how WordPress handles it:

MySite/Topics/battle-of-the-bulge

The research I’ve done suggests there really isn’t a significant difference in the way search engines handle the different URL styles, as they focus more on content. However, if I adopted WordPress, I’d have little choice but modify my URL’s. I’ve learned that I can make WordPress display URL’s with underscores and capital letters, but it isn’t recommended, as WordPress’ permalinks are “baked into its architecture.”

In summary, it looks like I have two choices: 1) Adopt WordPress and change all my URL’s, or 2) Choose a different CMS.

Does that make sense, or am I missing something? Do you have any preferences for a particular URL style?

Thanks.

Yes hyphens in URL’s are preferred but underscores will still work and search engines will have no trouble indexing them.

If Wordpress’s baked in URL formatting won’t work for you then there are plenty of other CMS’s that won’t interfere with your underscore format, which system is really down to what sort of content you have and how you want it structured.

I’ve always used hyphens :slight_smile:

It is always preferred and suggested that you used hyphen instead of any other special symbols, don’t try to copy Wikipedia’s URL, do you understand you are talking about “WIKIPEDIA”, it has everything that counts as the best in the market and in terms of Search engines, the content, the user interaction, DA, PA, trust Flow, The domain extension . org and last but not the least it is a Website for information not for commercial purpose. So stop thinking to copy Wikipedia, yes if you want to copy then copy everything that Wikipedia has.

And as per your URL structure use hyphens, it is better and suggestible also.

If you decide to go with WordPress I think you should change the underscores in the filenames to hyphens.

But don’t change them manually! There are many programs that can do that for you.

If you have a lot of internal site links in your files it will be trickier, but still possible.

I often do “find - replace all” using Notepad++ but if you start a new thread asking I’m sure you’ll get more if not better options.