1 URL for your website
With a website you have a number of choices and settings that you can leave for what it is, the default URL layout in most websites is not optimized. This can cause you to rank lower in search engines and can cause confusion for users of your website. Let's cover in this blog post why only 1 URL should be served from your website, and how you can set this up.
A website can be seen as multiple websites by search engines, it's up to you to make sure that your desired location is listed on top and that the same URL is consistently served everywhere you have a listing for your website. You do this by building up the discipline to always use your full URL. It doesn't matter if it is in the mail or on other websites. Let's cover the basics of an URL and what it is exactly.
Starting with the basics, what is a URL?
A URL is an address on the internet, together with a domain name they make sure that your website is visible under your domain name and not through an IP address. A URL is actually everything that is entered in the browser bar for your website. Like we use the main URL https://www.mijnhostingpartner.nl/ for example. For your website this can be used in the same way. Everything that comes after the domain name and the domain name extension is also a URL. Like https://www.mijnhostingpartner.nl/blog/ and everything from the knowledge base for example.
The URLs should be good for search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. And they need to be readable and understandable for visitors. For example, a /blog/1-url-for-website is easier to read than a URL that uses an ID for the post. /blog/123644?-th as an example. This therefore loses a lot of value, and will be difficult to rank in search engines, no matter how good the content on the page is. The URL structure is therefore very important for your website and needs to be right from the start.
Why it is important to serve only 1 URL
It is important to serve only one form of URL structure next to the rest. When you support all URL's on a website it might be seen as duplicate content. And because of this it will loose value in the ranking. 1 URL can be seen as everything that comes before the URL. Most websites nowadays will use a SSL certificate. In other words, a secure connection between the user and your website. This SSL certificate prevents that data entered on the website, for example for an order, can be read by third parties who are on the same network. And is also a ranking factor in search engines.
So serve 1 version of your domain name. This can be:https://www.mijnhostingpartner.nl
https://mijnhostingpartner.nl
https://www.mijnhostingpartner.nl
https://mijnhostingpartner.nl
Make a choice, preferably one of the https URLs. This is particularly easy with the WordPress content management system. This choice can be made within WordPress itself with 1 button that takes care of this for you. More on this in the next point in the article.
How do you set this up? Database, web.config file
To set 1 URL for your website you will need to do some research on the way you use to create the website. For different systems this is often slightly different. The most common way to set a URL is through the database, where the redirect takes place at the website level. And through the web.config, where it is done in a more direct way. With a database redirect this can save just a few milliseconds in loading speed, where the web.config method works just a little faster. With a small adjustment in the web.config you can easily arrange this. How to do this exactly is explained in our previous knowledge base article.
Specifically for WordPress you can find the following manual, here we explain the steps.
Through the database there is often a preferred URL set, you can change this through PHPMyAdmin or your administrator program of choice, and change this URL to the https version. Then this continues in the right way. When you still get error messages from to many redirects, then you have probably fixed this in several places. Which will result in a redirect on a redirect. And thus will not work. This can often be rectified with the web.config redirect.
For more tips and tricks for your website, you can follow our blog posts, and of course stay informed through our Social Media channels! Order your website webhosting at MijnHostingPartner.nl now to get the best out of your website.
