A permalink is the permanent web address of a single page, post or product, meant to stay the same forever. The name is short for permanent link, and the idea is that once you publish something at a given address, anyone who bookmarks it or links to it can always come back to the same place. It is the one part of a page you really do not want to change on a whim.
Think of it like a house number on a street. People write it on an envelope, save it in their contacts and trust that mail keeps arriving even years later. If you suddenly renumber the house without telling the post office, deliveries fail and visitors end up at the wrong door. A permalink works the same way, which is why a clean, stable URL structure matters so much for both visitors and Google. Search engines treat the address as the identity of the page.
If you ever do need to change one, the safe move is a 301 redirect from the old permalink to the new one. That quietly forwards anyone using the old address and tells search engines the page has permanently moved, so you keep most of your traffic and rankings instead of starting from zero on a fresh URL.
The shape of the permalink is worth getting right on day one. /blog/website-speed tells a visitor and a search engine what the page is about before they even click. /?p=482 tells them nothing. The first version also earns more clicks when someone shares the bare link, and it survives a redesign better, because there is no date or category baked in that you might later want to drop. Pick the pattern once, and let every future post follow it.
At TopDevs we set readable, lasting permalinks from day one and guard them carefully during redesigns, so a client never loses the links, shares and search positions they have built up over the years.
