URL structure: what to get right first

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. If you only fix one thing about URL structure this quarter, make it the first item below.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Start here

Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Then this

Changing them later costs you rankings unless you redirect. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Eventually

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What this looks like day to day

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about URL structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.