When URL structure is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. URL structure is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

When it is worth it

Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How to decide

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more — 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.