Questions about URL structure and information architecture are easy to get confused, but it's an important distinction to maintain. IA tends to be more impactful than URL decisions alone, but advice given around IA often defaults to suggestions on how to best structure your URLs. In this Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow helps us distinguish between the two disparate topics and shares some guiding questions to ask about each.
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Video Transcription
Hi, everyone. Welcome to a British Whiteboard Friday. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm one of the founders of Distilled, and I wanted to go back to some basics today. I wanted to cover a little bit of the difference between URL structure and information architecture, because I see these two concepts unfortunately mixed up a little bit too often when people are talking about advice that they want to give.
I'm thinking here particularly from an SEO perspective. So there is a much broader study of information architecture. But here we're thinking really about: What do the search engines care about, and what do users care about when they're searching? So we'll link some basics about things like what is URL structure, but we're essentially talking here about the path, right, the bit that comes after the domain www.example.com/whatever-comes-next.
There's a couple of main ways of structuring your URL. You can have kind of a subfolder type of structure or a much flatter structure where everything is kind of collapsed into the one level. There are pros and cons of different ways of doing this stuff, and there's a ton of advice. You're generally trading off considerations around, in general, it's better to have shorter URLs than longer URLs, but