CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urloptimizationdrupalhyperlinkhierarchy
Brendan
Brendan

Reputation: 107

Pros and Cons of using hierarchical URLs versus flat?

I'm building a large news site and we'll have several thousand articles. So far we have over 20,000. We plan on having a main menu which contains links which will display articles based on those criteria. Therefore, clicking "baking" will show all articles related to "baking", and "baking/cakes" will show everything related to cakes.

Right now, we're weighing whether or not to use hierarchical URLs for each article. If I'm on the "baking/cakes" page, and I click an article that says "Chocolate Raspberry Cake", would it be best to put that article at a specific, hierarchical URL like this:

website.com/baking/cakes/chocolate-raspberry-cake

or a generic, flat one like this:

website.com/articles/chocolate-raspberry-cake

What are the pros and cons of doing each? I can think of cases for each approach, but I'm wondering what you think.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 405

Answers (1)

Scratch Fury
Scratch Fury

Reputation: 76

It really depends on the structure of your site. There's no one correct answer for every site.

That being said, here's my recommendation for a news site: instead of embedding the category in the URL, embed the date. For example: website.com/article/2016/11/18/chocolate-raspberry-cake or even website.com/2016/11/18/chocolate-raspberry-cake. This allows you to write about Chocolate Raspberry Cake more than once, as long as you don't do it on the same day. When I'm browsing news I find it helpful to identify the date an article was written as quickly as possible; embedding it in the URL is very helpful.

Hierarchical URLs based on categories lock you into a single category for each article, which may be too limiting. There may be articles which fit multiple categories. If you've set up your site to require each article to have a single primary category, then this may not be an issue for you.

Hierarchical URLs based on categories can also be problematic if any of the categories ever change. For example, in the case of typos, changes to pluralization, a new term coming into vogue and replacing an existing term, or even just a change in wording (e.g. "baking" could become "baked goods"). The terms as they existed when you created the article will be forever immortalized in your URL structure, unless you retroactively change them all (invalidating old links, so make sure to use Drupal's Redirect module).

If embedding the date in the URL is not an option, then my second choice would be the flat URL structure because it will give you URLs which are shorter and easier to remember. I would recommend using "article" instead of "articles" in the URL because it saves you a character.

Upvotes: 3

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