Although it can sometimes be easy to forget about that little URL bar at the top of your browser, what it contains for each page can be surprisingly important. Creating good paths (the part of the URL after the domain name) for your site content can have numerous benefits, especially for SEO, but doing so can be a bit frustrating. Usually, you end up needing to re-type most of the page title into Drupal's URL alias field, which isn't necessarily too bad on its own, but it's still an extra step whenever you create content. And what about when you update the page and change the title? This is where it gets very easy to forget to change the path, which can lead not only to worse SEO but also to your site's visitors not ending up on a page with the content they expected it to have.
Fortunately, the Pathauto module makes all such worries a thing of the past.
This module adds a whole host of new options to how you can configure Drupal's paths, perhaps the most important of which is path "patterns". Patterns allow you specify what you want your paths to look like for different pieces of content; for instance, if you have a site where each of its users can have a blog, you could set up a pattern for Blog nodes such as "/blog/[node:author]/[node:title]". Then, whenever a user creates a blog post, it will automatically be given an alias which includes their username and the title of the post, and it will even update the alias if the user edits the post to change its title.
If you already have a site which has inconsistent aliases, Pathauto can also be used to bulk generate new aliases for your content, which is also quite helpful if you ever decide you want to change the structure of your paths. The module also offers plenty of settings to configure exactly what the paths it generates look like, including the ability to use a wide range of tokens provided by the Tokens module.
Finally, Pathauto also integrates with the excellent Redirect module. If you have both modules installed, changing the title of your content won't just change the path, it will also create a redirect from the old path to the new one so that any links already out there to the old URL will continue to function as expected. This is a rather important bit of functionality, and thanks to Drupal's great selection of contrib modules, it's just a few clicks away from being set up and working on your site.
