URL structure decisions are cheap before launch and expensive afterwards, because changing an address means redirects, lost links, and a period of instability. Get four things right at the start, keep them short and descriptive, and then leave them alone permanently.
Why this is worth thinking about once
An address that has existed for years has accumulated things: links from other sites, bookmarks, references in printed material, and a crawl history. Changing it does not destroy those, and it does put a redirect between every one of them and the destination.
That is manageable for a handful of pages and genuinely costly across a site. Which makes this one of the few areas where a decision made carelessly in week one is still costing money in year five.
The four decisions
1. www or not
Either works and there is no ranking difference. What matters is choosing one and redirecting the other permanently, so the site is not reachable at two addresses.
A small practical consideration: the non-www form limits certain DNS configurations at the root of a domain, which occasionally matters for particular hosting arrangements. For most small sites it does not.
2. Trailing slash or not
Genuinely arbitrary and genuinely worth deciding, because inconsistency creates two addresses for every page. Pick one, redirect the other, and ensure internal links use the chosen form.
3. Folders or flat
Whether pages sit at the top level or nested inside category folders. Nesting communicates structure and makes reporting by section easier. Flat is simpler and avoids the situation where a page needs moving because a category changed.
For a small business site, flat is usually the safer choice, since business structure changes more often than anyone expects and a nested address ties the page to a category that may not last.
4. What goes in the address
Short, descriptive, lowercase, hyphen-separated words. That is the whole rule and it is not controversial.
What makes a good address
- Readable by a person. Someone should be able to guess what the page contains from the address alone.
- Short. Three or four meaningful words. Long addresses truncate in results and are awkward to share.
- Hyphens between words, not underscores, which are treated differently.
- Lowercase only. Addresses are case-sensitive on most servers, so mixed case creates variants and confusion.
- No dates, unless genuinely dated. A date in the address makes a page look stale forever and prevents updating it without either misleading readers or changing the address.
- No numbers or codes where a word would serve.
- Stable words. Avoid anything referring to a year, a promotion, or a product name likely to change.
The traps
- Dates in blog addresses. The most common regret. A post from 2022 that you update thoroughly still looks like a post from 2022, and fixing that means a redirect.
- Category names in addresses. Reorganise your categories later and every page inside needs moving.
- Stuffing keywords. An address repeating your service and town several times reads as spam and gains nothing.
- Automatically generated addresses from long page titles, producing something unreadable that nobody edited.
- Uppercase letters, which quietly create duplicate addresses.
- Changing addresses during a redesign because a new system prefers a different pattern. Most systems can be configured to keep the existing structure, and doing so avoids the largest risk in a rebuild, as covered in migrating off a page builder.
If you already have a poor structure
Usually leave it. The cost of changing generally exceeds the benefit of tidier addresses, and an ugly address that has worked for four years is not a problem worth creating a project around.
Exceptions worth acting on: addresses containing something actively misleading, addresses that break when shared, and cases where you are rebuilding anyway and can correct the pattern once with proper redirects.
The rest is aesthetics, and aesthetics is not a good reason to introduce redirects across a site.
Frequently asked questions
Should my site use www or not?
Either is fine and there is no ranking difference. What matters is picking one and permanently redirecting the other, so the site is not reachable at two separate addresses with signals split between them.
Do trailing slashes in URLs matter?
Only for consistency. The choice itself is arbitrary, but a site reachable both with and without trailing slashes has two addresses for every page, so one form should be chosen, the other redirected, and internal links should use the chosen form.
Should URLs include dates?
Generally not. A date in the address makes a page appear permanently dated even after thorough updating, and removing it later requires a redirect. This is one of the more common structural regrets on business blogs.
Are folders or flat URLs better?
For most small business sites, flat is safer. Nesting communicates structure and makes section reporting easier, but it ties each page to a category, and business structure changes more often than expected, which then forces addresses to move.
Should I fix badly structured URLs on an existing site?
Not as a standalone project. On a working site the cost of moving addresses usually outweighs the benefit of tidier ones, so the sensible moment is during a rebuild, when structure is corrected once and redirected properly in a single pass. Genuinely misleading addresses are the exception and worth dealing with sooner.
Do keywords in URLs help rankings?
Descriptive words help readers understand what a page contains and contribute modestly, but repeating a service and location several times in an address reads as spam and gains nothing. Short and readable is the workable standard.
West Coast Media Solutions Inc. builds and maintains websites for businesses across Canada. Technical behaviour described here reflects how search engines and browsers currently work; specifics change, and your own configuration is what determines the outcome on your site.
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