Pretty URLs, or 9 Rules for Creating Human-friendly URLs for Website

A page’s URL can look several ways, and selecting between them depends on the way the site is implemented and prepped for search engine optimization. Page addresses often look kind of ugly and incomprehensible: they can contain different symbols, numbers, letters, and can be long or even super long. Making your URLs human-friendly is considered good style.

A friendly URL  is a short and succinct page address that immediately shows what a given page is about to both humans and web crawlers.

If your site has SEO-friendly URLs, and if they’re implemented correctly, you’ll benefit from several advantages:

• It positively affects your ranking in search engines since their robots detect keywords in an address.
• It can potentially affect click-through rate in search engines if users can understand the contents of a page just by looking at its URL:
  • https://site.com/?p=1234 (not understandable)
  • https://site.com/seo-tools (understandable)
• It can help visitors navigate your site, and since such URLs are easy to remember, users can share it with others.
• It creates a comfortable and understandable navigation map of your site thanks to nesting levels and using section headers in page URLs.

Page addresses are so important that Google guidelines for developers have a whole section dedicated to them.

1. Bad addresses with non-friendly URLs:
   

   http://site.com/?p=1234

   http://site.com/filter/s-is-1e915c77-7e54-11e2-b65b-60d8192d1895/

2. Friendly URLs:

https://site.com/catalog/kitchen/green/ (words according to nested hierarchy)

https://site.com/news/2022/05/12/ (dates, numbers)

http://site.com/service/package-delivery/ (the full name of a product/service)

As you can see, in the second set of examples, it’s possible to guess the contents of a page even if they're not familiar with the website? The same can’t be said for the first examples. And this, essentially, is the difference between just a URL and a friendly URL.

Here is a set of rules you can use when creating friendly URLs for your site. You can apply them when making a new site, as well as implement on your existing sites if their page addresses are currently not that “good”.

1. Your URL should not be long. The optimal length is 60–80 symbols (shorter URLs are believed to improve the ranking of their pages and ease the searching and scanning process for a search engine).
2. Your URL should contain only Latin letters, symbols, and numbers.
3. You can use capital letters either for the first word or for all words in your URL. 
4. If you have several words, then separate them with hyphens (this is more preferable for Google) so that search engines can parse each individual word. Alternatively, use underscores _ (but it’s better to avoid them if you can). Use only one mask throughout the whole site so that your URLs are uniform.
5. Spaces are not allowed between words in page addresses.
6. Don’t use ! % ( ) " ' symbols.
7. Always use keywords in your page addresses.
8. If your URL mask is supposed to include numbers (for example, parameters like 290x95x82), then use the Latin letter ‘x’ between numerals. Furthermore, it's preferable to create only one template for this type of friendly URL and then use it for the whole site. Don’t use different schemes for the same type of numerical addresses, like 290x95x82, and 290+95+82, and 290-95-82. Instead, create and use a single template for all similar ones.
9. Don’t add additional words (“color-red”, “material-skin”) to parameters or materials. For example, if we need a URL for a red kitchen, then the full address should be simple: https://site.com/kitchen/red/ or https://site.com/kitchen/skin/. Everything should be simple and concise.

Follow these rules and you will have beautiful, easy-to-read page addresses that are also more attractive to search engines and users alike. Correctly formulated addresses are better, more useful, and more esthetically pleasing than old, bulky, and incomprehensible URLs. Be sure to use human-friendly URLs — and good luck with your website promotion!