If you are using pretty permalinks, you may have noticed WordPress sanitizes it removing accents and some special characters.

However some of these characters are not sanitized by default, meaning they can be added to some of your post URLs, like a trademark symbol(®), a copyright symbol(©) or even a UTF-8 symbol like ⛓.

Although it may not hurt you at first, it may let users confused and it can cause some problems when interacting with some third party API that is not prepared to read such characters.

This plugin Removes special characters from permalinks.

How to use it?

There are two different ways of using it:
– Simply save/update your post and you will notice special characters will be swiped out from the permalink.
– Go to Tools / Remove Characters and click on the Remove button to remove special characters from all permalinks

Settings Page

Located on Settings > Special Characters, the Settings Page offers the following options:

Force Redirection

Force redirection from old permalinks to the new ones, after special characters have been removed

Notification Email

Send an email when the removal process is complete

Removal Page

Located on Tools > Remove Characters, the Removal Page allows removing the special characters from all permalinks on your site. You don’t need to worry if you have a lot of posts because only posts with special characters on permalinks are selected and the removal process happens in the background. You will receive a email when it’s over.

Differences between free and pro

The pro version allows to remove special characters from all permalinks, including posts, pages and all custom post types