What is a URL?

A URL is the full web address of a page or file on the internet: the text you see in your browser's address bar. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and each one points to one place, such as a single page of your website. If your bakery's website is at yourbakery.co.uk, the URL of its birthday cakes page could be https://www.yourbakery.co.uk/cakes/birthday-cakes. When someone asks for the URL of a page, this full address is what they need.

What are the parts of a URL?

Most URLs are built from the same components, and this address of a page on your bakery's website shows all of them but one: https://www.yourbakery.co.uk/cakes/birthday-cakes?size=large#delivery

• Scheme: https is the scheme. It tells the browser which protocol, the set of rules for fetching the page, to use. For websites that's HTTP or HTTPS. HTTPS is the encrypted version, which lets visitors send information such as card details safely.
• Subdomain: www is a subdomain, a name that comes before the domain name. Subdomains give part of a website its own address, such as shop.yourbakery.co.uk for an online shop.
• Domain name: yourbakery.co.uk is your domain name, made of the name you registered, yourbakery, and the domain extension after it. The Domain Name System (DNS) translates it into the numerical IP address of the server that holds your website, so visitors don't have to remember a string of numbers.
• Domain extension: .co.uk is the ending of your domain name. It's one of the UK's domain extensions under .uk, the country's top-level domain.
• Port: a number that can follow the domain name after a colon. You won't see one in most addresses, this one included, because it's usually left out when the web server uses the standard ports: 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS.
• Path: /cakes/birthday-cakes leads to the page itself. Each slash opens a level, like folders on a computer: the birthday cakes page sits in the cakes section. Some paths end in a file name, such as /images/birthday-cake.gif for an image.
• Parameters: ?size=large gives the website extra information. Parameters start after a question mark, each one a name and a value joined by an equals sign, and an ampersand (&) separates them when there's more than one. Websites use them to filter, search or sort what the page shows.
• Anchor: #delivery points to a spot on the page, here the delivery section, and the browser scrolls straight to it.

When you open a URL, your browser first needs the IP address behind the domain name. If your computer doesn't know it yet, the browser asks a DNS server, whose job is to say which IP address matches each registered domain name. The browser then asks the web server at that IP address for the page in the path, and the parameters travel with the request, so the server can use them before it sends the page back. Once the page has loaded, the browser scrolls to the anchor.

What is the difference between a URL and a link?

A URL is an address, and a link is what takes you there. A link, or hyperlink, is clickable text or an image on a web page with a URL behind it. When a visitor clicks the words "Birthday cakes" on your homepage, they follow a link, and the browser opens the URL behind those words. People often use both words for the same thing: if someone asks you to send them a link, they want the URL.

Is a URL the same as a domain name?

No. Your domain name is part of every URL on your website, but a URL is the whole address of one page. For your bakery, the domain name is yourbakery.co.uk, and https://www.yourbakery.co.uk/cakes/birthday-cakes is the URL of one page on it.

Search over 400 extensions, from .co.uk to .com, to see if your name is available.

How to create good URLs for your website

Every page you add gets an address of its own, and changing one later takes a redirect, so it's worth deciding how your URLs look before you build. Google recommends a simple structure built from words people understand.

Our advice: plan your URL structure around the sections of your website, and give each page a short address of readable words under its section, such as /cakes/birthday-cakes or /blog/how-to-store-bread. A clear address tells visitors where they are, and you can add pages later without changing the ones you already have.

Within that structure, a few rules keep each address short and easy to read.

• Use readable words rather than long ID numbers. /cakes/birthday-cakes says what the page is about, while an address full of ID numbers doesn't.
• Separate words with hyphens, not underscores. Google recommends hyphens because they help people and search engines see the separate words: birthday-cakes, not birthday_cakes.
• Stick to lower case. Google treats /Cakes and /cakes as different URLs, so writing every address in lower case avoids mix-ups.
• Leave out parameters that don't change what's on the page, so the address stays short, and leave the year out of the URL of a page you'll update each year, such as /blog/cake-trends, so you don't have to change the URL.
• Avoid spaces and special characters. A letter like ü should be percent-encoded in the address, which turns it into percent signs and a string of letters and numbers that's hard to read and to type.

Should you change a URL?

Only when you need to, and then with a permanent redirect from the old address to the new one. Visitors may have bookmarked the old address and other websites may link to it, and without a redirect they all land on a 404 page instead of the page they wanted.

A 301 redirect sends everyone who opens the old address straight to the new one, and Google takes it as a signal that the new URL is the one to show in its search results. If your website runs on web hosting with us, you can set up the redirect in the .htaccess file in your website's root folder, and our help article on redirecting visitors with the .htaccess file shows how. Once the redirect is in place, update the links on your own website so they point to the new address.

Build your own website

With your domain name in place and the sections of your website planned, you can build your website with our Aida AI Website Builder and publish it on that domain.