A URL is a page's address. It is seen by people deciding whether to click, used by search engines as a mild signal of what a page covers, and — crucially — it is the thing everything else points at.
| URL | |
|---|---|
| Poor | site.com/p?id=8842&cat=3 |
| Better | site.com/laptop-buying-guide |
| Better still | site.com/guides/laptop-buying-guide |
A person can guess what the last one contains before clicking. That is the whole goal — a URL that describes its page is more clickable when shared, easier to remember, and gives a search engine one more small, consistent hint about the topic.
laptop-buying-guide, not laptop_buying_guide or laptopbuyingguide./Guide and /guide as different pages, which creates accidental duplicates.a, the, and rarely earn their place./guides/, /services/, /blog/. Do not invent depth for its own sake.This is the part people underestimate. When you change a published page's URL, the old address stops working. Everything pointing at it breaks at once:
The tool for handling this is a 301 redirect — a server instruction that permanently forwards the old address to the new one, passing along most of the accumulated value. If you must change a URL, a 301 is not optional.
Decide early
The lesson to take from this is not "never change URLs" but get them right before publishing, because that is the only moment the change is free. Once a page is live and linked, every change costs something even when handled correctly.
Putting a publication date in the path — /2026/08/laptop-guide — is a common blogging convention, and it has a downside worth knowing: it makes the content look dated even after you update it, and it means a genuinely evergreen article carries a timestamp forever. Unless the date is meaningfully part of what the page is, such as news, leaving it out ages better.