How to Create Custom User Profile URLs and Dynamic Slugs In WordPress

Create Custom User Profile URLs and Dynamic Slugs with ProfileGrid

Page URLs or permalinks play a significant role in SEO. A single change in the URL’s characters can determine success or failure of that page. If you have a WordPress membership site, custom user profile URLs and dynamic slugs can earn you more traffic than ever before.

The ProfileGrid plugin lets you create membership sites with custom user profiles. These users can share blog posts, photos, and even sell products. In this article, we are going to see how you can create custom user profile URLs and dynamic slugs with the use of ProfileGrid.

Activating Custom Profile Slugs Extension

The WordPress ProfileGrid plugin comes with a whole set of extensions. One of which is the Custom Profile Slugs Extension. This extension is part of the free ProfileGrid version. The free version also contains other useful extensions such as WooCommerce and bbPress Integration, User Display Name etc. We will go ahead and activate the Custom Profile Slugs Extension from the Extensions page of ProfileGrid.

After activation, the extension appears in the ‘Global Setting’ page under the ‘General’ category. When you click on the Custom Profile Slugs option, you’ll be taken to a page called Custom Profile Slugs page. On this page, you will get three options to create custom user profile URLs and dynamic slugs. These are:

• User ID ( /?uid=1 )
• User Name ( /?uid=username )
• Random Number ( /?uid=TWNDNFoxQit0M3FicG9ad3ROQzZEZz09 )

Notice that in the above example, we have selected the ‘Username’ option to create custom user profile URLs and dynamic slugs. Let’s visit the user profile on the frontend to see how the customized URL will appear.

This is the profile of ‘Erica Shaw’. One of the users on my local WordPress site.

And this is the permalink, or profile slug, of Erica Shaw’s profile. You can see that ‘Erica’, which is her as username, appears in the URL of her profile.

Similarly, the admin can choose the user ID pattern too. This will display the user’s ID on the profile slug.

The above URL shows Erica’s user ID instead of name now. This is the user ID with which the profile is registered on the WordPress. As you may have guessed already, this customization is applied globally. All user profiles will follow the same URL pattern that you set from ProfileGrid’s settings. Moreover, this adds consistency to all the profile links on your membership site.

The Need to Create Custom User Profile URLs and Dynamic Slugs

It is very important to create custom user profile URLs and dynamic slugs as URLs are the fundamental elements of SEO. Besides, you have to think of your URLs as the first impression. Search engines will first notice the URL of a page before moving onto its content. However, if the URL is unique, the page already has a head start. The user profiles you create through ProfileGrid already expands your site’s online presence in more ways than one. And then if site visitors can reach user profiles directly through their URLs, that’s just another advantage on top.

You can use ProfileGrid to list your workplace staff or students from an institution. And when they’ll create blogs or share content on site, their unique permalinks will carry that data along. This’ll make their profile URLs even more attractive to search engines.

A Profile Customizer’s Friend

The WordPress ProfileGrid plugin doesn’t just help you create custom user profile URLs and dynamic slugs. It has many other customizing tools to create a dynamic membership site. The Custom Profile Slugs extension engages your users as well as search engines to the profiles on your WordPress membership site. In short, being able to help users customize their profiles without code makes ProfileGrid the most popular choice for building WordPress membership sites.