A short guide to URL structure

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Everything we would tell a client about URL structure in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What is actually at stake

Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The practical version

Changing them later costs you rankings unless you redirect. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Where it usually goes wrong

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.