UX Guidelines For Better URL Design

When it comes to URLs, there’s a common assumption that most people don’t pay attention to them. That people don’t even notice URLs, don’t remember them, and that they can always re-find what they are looking for anyway. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

People do still read URLs in search engines every day, and although AI is changing user behavior, URLs continue to play an important role for the user experience. So, what makes an effective URL? Let’s take a closer look.

Three Key Tasks Of Good URLs #

Good URLs support 3 key tasks: they explain to users where they will go or where they are, they support sharing in social networks, and they serve as strong signal for search engines. The best way to achieve all of this is by keeping URLs short and simple.

At this point, we don’t need to stuff URLs with keywords to perfectly match the title. They must be unique, but consider if one or two keywords would be enough to communicate their purpose.

Remove what you can remove (e.g., www, home.html, etc.) and be consistent about trailing slashes to prevent URL duplication (i.e., choose between /news/ and /news, and create 301 redirects from the one you don’t use).

Checklist For A Well-Designed URL #

Make It Short And Readable #

A good URL is a mini description of a page. It needs to be both human- and machine-readable.

• Shorter is better, max. 60–75 characters.
• Lowercase only, not mixedCase and not UPPERCASE.
• Use hyphens (-) to separate words, not underscores (_).
• Use stems of verbs (e.g., /make-thing rather than /making-thing).
• Stop words (“the”, “and”, “in”, “a”) are not needed but won’t hurt SEO.

Make It Logical #

People send URLs via email, WhatsApp, or print them in PDFs, so a logical structure is key to ensuring they can easily make sense of a URL.

• Use logical hierarchies that tell a story (e.g., /en/topics/ukraine).
• Include dates for date-specific documents.
• Multilingual sites need language-specific subfolders (e.g., /en/, /fr/, etc.).

Make It Easy To Type #

Typing simple words is easier than typing a string of random characters.

• Avoid empty spaces as / text/ is turned into /%20text/.
• Avoid special and reserved characters (e.g., #, ?, &, =, +, %, /).
• Avoid accent characters like ü, ö, ß, é (e.g., ü turns into %C3%BC in an URL).
• Avoid repeating keywords and complex shorteners.
• Set up short links for important pages (e.g., europarl.eu/go/DMA2025).

Examples Of Good URL Design #

A great test for the brevity and clarity of URLs is if you can spell a chosen URL on a mobile phone or write it on a piece of paper. And sometimes, it might be a good idea to set up aliases that people can use — to make the URL more marketable and more memorable.

Here are some examples of how we can tweak an existing URL to make it more user-friendly:

• https://www.un.com/plenary/en/home.html → live.un.com/plenary
• /about-our-company/ → company.com/about
• /frequently-asked-questions/ → company.com/faq
• /locations/us/nebraska/lincoln/havelock → locations/havelock
• /press-releases-announcements/ → company.com/press
• /designing-digital-products/ → /product-design/
• /delivering-new-features/ → /deliver-features/

URLs In Times Of AI #

With AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI search (including Google’s) on the rise, there is a strong sentiment that URLs are irrelevant these days as people don’t navigate to pages any longer. However, the effect isn’t as noticeable as one might think.

There is definitely a shift happening, but according to Rand Fishkin’s research, users perform 126 searches per month on Google (new record!), and Google has been growing steadily from year to year, including in 2024.

We don’t know how much time is spent clicking through pages and how much reading AI responses. But it’s wrong to say that AI is troubling Google — users just search more. As of March 2025, Google’s market share is at 93.57% and ChatGPT is only at 0.25%. So let’s give our URLs a bit of extra love to make them more effective — for our users, but also to boost the SEO of our pages.

URL Guidelines In Design Systems #

Setting up guidelines for URL design is a good idea to ensure everyone on the team follows the same logic. Here are some great examples from how real-world design systems document their URL standards.

• Gov.au
• VA.gov
• Publications Office EU
• FPAC

Useful Resources #

• URL Design Checklist, by Gov.au
• Google SEO Guidelines
• Your Website’s URLs Can and Should Be Beautiful, by Jason Morehead
• The Hidden UX of URLs, by Michael Soriano
• A Complete Guide to URL Design, by Christine Skopec, Zach Paruch

Wrapping Up #

A URL might be a small detail and one that easily falls through the cracks given the more obvious user experience challenges that we need to solve in our work every day. However, URLs play a critical role in providing orientation for users, simplifying sharing, and serving as SEO for search engines.

Luckily, designing better URLs isn’t a big commitment once you’ve understood what to watch out for. We hope that the tips above will inspire you to take another look at your URLs and to tweak them if needed to make them even more useful.