URL Structure
How the address of a page is built, which is the first clue about where the page sits in the site.
Analogy Mental model
A street address. The shorter and more predictable it is, the faster the courier finds the door.
In practice What you actually do
Three to five words, the primary term among them, hyphens between words, all lowercase, no dates and no session parameters. /best-coffee-makers beats /p?id=123&cat=456 for a reader deciding whether to click and for a crawler deciding what the page is.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
URLs are expensive to change once links point at them. If a change is unavoidable, redirect each old URL individually rather than letting it 404. Underscores, uppercase and non-ASCII characters all create problems that did not need to exist.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →