Application URL Design Tips

Useful tips for organizing the URLs in a web app

in Software — 257 words — 1 min read — No comments yet

It’s not every day that a question on Stack Overflow proves helpful rather than an answer, but this Stack Overflow question about organizing URLs provides some great tips. I’ve included them here for permanence:

  1. Namespacing features behind the username like example.com/{username}/followers [is ideal] for public features that belong to each user individually.
  2. Private things, such as account settings, should never be namespaced behind the username, and should just appear after /account or /settings.
  3. It’s best to keep the base resource URLs as lean as possible. Filters, sorting requirements, advanced searching and pagination can all be implemented as query parameters.
  4. A query string should be treated as an optional addition to the page; the URL should work to produce a valid and useful page even when it’s removed.
  5. In a good, hackable URL, a human can adjust or remove parts of the path and get expected results from your site. [Good URls] give your visitors better orientation around your pages, and enable them to easily move up levels.
  6. By embedding a unique ID early on in your path, you can have long, fully descriptive URLs when needed but still enjoy the reliability of shorter URLs and the speed of ID lookups.
  7. Adding multiple keywords to URLs may help with SEO, but it will confuse your users. Also, you’ll quickly run the risk of being marked as a keyword spammer.

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