Page Addresses
A page’s address is what people bookmark, share and find in search results. It deserves more thought than it usually gets.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Layout & Pages:
- Page Builder — documents, revisions and publishing
- Pages — the site’s page structure
Architect Panel → Configuration:
- Friendly URLs — generated addresses for records
- Search Engine Optimisation — how pages are presented
Pages against records
A page in the site structure has an address you choose. Addresses for records are generated by friendly URL rules from a field — a different mechanism, covered under Site Configuration.
Both end up as readable addresses; only one of them is something you type.
Choose short and descriptive
Lower case, hyphens between words, no dates, no version numbers, no internal codes. The address should say what the page is to somebody who has never seen your site.
Reflect the structure
A page nested under a parent should have an address that shows it. Readers use addresses to understand where they are, and search engines use them to understand your structure.
Do not put dates in
The most regretted choice. An address containing a year is an address that looks stale next January, and changing it breaks every link to it.
Addresses should not change
Once a page has been published, its address has been shared, indexed and bookmarked. Changing it breaks all of that silently — nobody tells you that a link in somebody’s e-mail from March stopped working.
Spend the extra minute before publishing rather than the hour afterwards.
When one has to change
Put a redirect in place from the old address, and expect it to be needed for years. A redirect is cheap; a broken link on a page you cannot edit is permanent.
Watch for collisions
Page addresses and generated record addresses share the same space. A page at a path that a friendly URL rule also generates under is a conflict, and the symptom is one of them resolving to the wrong thing.
Keep record rules under their own root and page addresses out of it.
Set the canonical too
Where a page is reachable by more than one address, the canonical says which one counts. Without it a search engine chooses, and it may not choose the readable one.
Worked example
A site uses short hyphenated addresses reflecting its structure, with no dates. Record addresses live under their own roots so they cannot collide with pages. A page that had to move kept a redirect, which was still receiving traffic eighteen months later.
Recommendations
- Short, lower case, hyphenated, no dates.
- Settle the address before publishing.
- Redirect whenever one must change.
- Keep record roots separate from page addresses.