Optimizing Your Ecommerce URLs: Why Structure Matters More Than You Think

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address you type into the browser to access specific websites and pages within them. It works exactly like your house address…except you can safely share its location with strangers online.

Your website is made up of URLs and the links that connect them. So, if you imagine that URLs are the addresses, and links are the streets, then the URL structure is the map of how pages and resources are organized on your website. 

Much like a well-planned city infrastructure, having a good URL structure will make your website intuitive to navigate, allowing users and search engines to discover content quickly and effortlessly. 

This is especially important for larger ecommerce sites which can have many thousands of products in store and want to benefit from tight ecommerce SEO.

I’m not going to lie. Designing ecommerce URL structures can get very technical. But if you want to be found online, the importance of establishing tight and logical URLs for your products and categories can’t be overstated. 

Stick with me as I demystify ecommerce URL structures in the following article: 

• URL Structures in 30 Seconds
• URL Anatomy 101
• Why Do You Need to Care About URL Structures?
• How Do You Structure an Ecommerce Website?
• Choose Between Static vs. Dynamic URLs Wisely
• The Debate: Trailing Slash vs. Non-Trailing Slash
• Subdomain vs. Subfolders: What’s Best for SEO?
• Mastering Click Depth for Better SEO
• The Importance of URL Consistency
• Keep URLs Short and Sweet

URL Structures in 30 Seconds

When we talk about URL structures, we explore questions like:

How are resources organized within a website? What are their resulting URLs? And, are they suited for their intended purpose?

This includes your: 

• Homepage, About, and other top-level pages.
• Store.
• Product pages (Product Detail Pages or PDPs). 
• Category pages (Product Listing Pages or PLPs).
• Blog.

How easy is it to navigate/crawl your website and discover content? 

Metrics like:

• Indexing.
• Crawl depth.
• Internal linking.
• Redirects.
• Canonicalization.

But before that. We can’t talk about URL structures without a solid understanding of what a URL actually is. 

URL Anatomy 101

Let’s look at the diagram below: 

It’s a lot, I know. But you need to comprehend this to analyze and strategize about your website URL structure.

Let’s break it down piece by piece.

Click the tabs below to expand more information!

Protocol

Protocol

The protocol is the invisible handshake that agrees on how data will be exchanged by the two parties – your computer and the web server hosting your website.

• http://– HyperText Transfer Protocol – is the traditional protocol used for web pages. 
• https:// – HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure – is a newer protocol that uses encryption to protect users’ data and privacy as well as authenticate entities on the Internet. HTTPS has become the standard for websites, and most website platforms and hosting providers offer it by default.
• You might have seen some other web protocols like ftp://, smtp://, and others. 

It’s absolutely critical for every modern website, and especially ecommerce websites, to ensure a secure connection for their users. HTTPS is a confirmed ranking factor and most modern browsers will throw warnings if your website loads without it. 

Always test and make sure your website loads with HTTPS and the protocol is valid. 

You can do it in the browser, by clicking on the options button at the left side of your URL bar, like so:

You can also use Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or dedicated SSL checkers—pretty much every modern SEO tool will show you if you have protocol security issues.

Subdomain

Subdomain

The subdomain is a prefix to the main domain (root domain) and represents a distinct section of your website. Depending on your setup, you could have:

• https://store.domain.com – for your ecommerce store – categories, products, cart, etc
• https://blog.domain.com – for your blog section
• https://podcast.domain.com – for hosting your Internet show
• https://us.domain.com – for the US version of an international brand or store

Subdomains can also be used to create a separate site within your website that has its own structure, design, and functionality.

https://www.domain.com—WWW (World Wide Web) was traditionally the subdomain and server that held the actual pages of a website. Other subdomains like FTP and SMTP were used for other functions.

Nowadays, largely deprecated, you can still see WWW as part of the URL for some websites. As a webmaster, you can choose whether to display it or not. 

We’ll discuss subdomains more in this section of the article. → Subdomain vs. Subfolders: What’s Best for SEO?

Root Domain

Root Domain

The root domain is your organization’s name on the Internet. Take a look at these examples:

• https://www.amazon.com/—Amazon is the name of the company. Amazon.com is the root domain
• https://www.walmart.com/—Walmart is the name of the company. Walmart.com is the root domain

When you set up a website, choosing and purchasing a domain is the first task you must complete. Often it is one of the more excruciating jobs as finding an available domain that fits your brand and market niche can be difficult, and expensive. 

It used to be that domains that contained keywords relevant to your search market gave you a significant competitive edge in rankings—however, that era is kind of over.

Today, I would focus on strong branding, rather than keyword-rich domain names.

Leave keyword optimization for the permalink part of your URLs. 

Top-level Domain — TLD

Top-level Domain — TLD

No domain is complete without a TLD. It’s the extension of the domain signifying the organization to which the domain is registered. 

https://www.amazon.com/ – .com is the top-level domain – the oldest and most commonly used top-level domain for businesses and commercial organizations.

https://www.amazon.de/ – This is an entirely different version of Amazon that’s targeted at German and European buyers.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of TLD extensions:

• Traditional – .net, .org, .gov
• Country-specific – .co.uk, .de, .it, .au, .co.za
• Niche-oriented – .art, .agency, .business

Just like the root domain, you choose the TLD as part of your initial registration. 

Country-specific domains are important for local and regional searches. 

Besides that, TLDs don’t influence rankings. However, they can affect the perception and user experience of your audience.

Folder / Directory / Path

Folder / Directory / Path

At its core, your website is just a folder in a hard drive stored on a server, in a data center somewhere in the world (preferably closer to your target audience).

Within that folder, there are more folders and files organized in some fashion. Just like the files on your computer, each folder has a name that corresponds to its URL on the Internet.

So for this URL, we have the following folder structure: 

https://us.sportsdirect.com/ladies/clothing/tops-and-t-shirts/t-shirts

Sportsdirect.com → US → Ladies → Clothing → Top and T Shirts → T Shirts

The structuring of these folders and the resultant URLs play a huge role in the accessibility and discoverability of your content. This in turn has a direct relation to your performance in search.

The more pages you have, the more important it becomes to establish a logical and tight folder structure. 

The folder URLs themselves are often used for the category pages in your store, so their naming is important if you plan to compete with them in search. 

File / Resource / Permalink

File / Resource / Permalink

This is the specific address of the web page you want to access. Videos, scripts, and every other resource available on the web has a distinct URL. For example:

• Web page: https://digitalcommerce.com/services/ecommerce-seo/
• Image: https://digitalcommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Proper-Cloth-blog-post-screenshot.webp
• PDF document: https://digitalcommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/what-is-a-content-marketing-strategy.pdf

Just like www, you’ll notice we stopped putting the .html extension on web page URLs because they’re the most common resource requested. You can still find it on some websites and it’s a completely valid way to configure your URLs. 

Now, some of these URLs can get very long, so it makes sense to simplify them for a better user experience.

It’s imperative to optimize your slug for clarity and SEO. This means:

Use hyphens for separating words.

Including your main keyword or its alternatives.

Use only lowercase words and numbers.

Query / Parameter

Query / Parameter

Queries can be appended to a URL to call for specific content, based on the user’s interaction with the page. 

They always start with the query separator “?” followed by a collection of parameters and values, separated by “&.”

Let’s take this as an example: 

https://domain.com/store/category/product?size=6&color=neon-green

Queries like these are used to enable many ecommerce functionalities like:

• Searching on a website
• Modifying store listings based on categories and tags
• Displaying different versions of the same product

We’ll talk more about queries in this section →  Choose Between Static vs. Dynamic URLs Wisely

Fragment 

Fragment 

Finally, the fragment refers to a specific element within an HTML page that has a unique ID. You can use these to create internal navigation with a page.

For example, the table of contents of this article is created by assigning IDs to each of the H2 headings and then linking to them at the top of the page. 

Why Do You Need to Care About URL Structures?

We all have at least a few messy folders on our hard drives. Either files are bunched together, or not organized in folders, or use random naming conventions and acronyms whose logic and meaning you can’t remember.

The only thing worse than browsing through your messy folders is browsing through somebody else’s messy folder. Except in this case, it’s the entire Internet trying to make sense of your website and discern one page from the other. 

Here’s the thing — they’re not going to go the extra mile for you.

If you confuse a visitor on your site they’ll just go back to the search results page and pick one of your competitors instead. 

If you confuse Google, they’ll just rank another website. Plenty are waiting for your place in the SERP.

Do It Right From the Start, or Suffer

Unlike your local hard drive, you don’t have the luxury of infinitely reorganizing and restructuring your website URLs. 

While nothing technically forbids you to change a page’s URL or the entire structure of your store, doing this often OR without the proper migration procedures will result in poor search performance. 

Just like the IRS, search engines want you to maintain a consistent address over time. Google likes updating content, not URLs. 

Vital for Ecommerce Stores

Smaller websites with a couple of dozen pages (portfolios, company websites, simple blogs) don’t need to care about URL structure as much. 

But ecommerce stores can have hundreds of categories and subcategories and thousands, if not tens of thousands of URLs. 

Depending on your ecommerce platform, the URL structure may already be defined and solved for you.

Either way, you need to be on top of your URLs if you have your eyes at the top of the search results page. 

How Do You Structure an Ecommerce Website?

The traditional URL structure of an ecommerce site looks like this:

Homepage → Shop → Category → Subcategory → Product → Product variation (color, etc) 

• domain.com
• domain.com/shop
• domain.com/shop/category
• domain.com/shop/category/subcategory
• domain.com/shop/category/subcategory/product
• domain.com/shop/category/subcategory/product/product variation 

For a smaller store, this URL structure is completely acceptable. However, the more your catalog grows, the more complex your URLs will become and the harder it becomes to manage them. 

What if a product falls into two different categories? What if you want to change a product’s category?

When product URLs are nested in their categories, the structure becomes rigid and difficult to change.

A popular ecommerce URL structure is to keep your categories hierarchical but separate your products in a different folder.

• domain.com
• domain.com/shop
• domain.com/shop/category
• domain.com/shop/category/subcategory
• domain.com/product
• domain.com/product?variant=2

For example: 

On Etsy’s site, we can see how the category URLs follow a hierarchical structure: 

• https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living
• https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living/outdoor-and-garden
• https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living/outdoor-and-garden/garden-decoration
• https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living/outdoor-and-garden/garden-decoration/yard-art

However, the product URLs are detached and grouped in their own directory /listing/, followed by a unique identifier to ensure no duplication:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1756970952/fern-sculpture-with-fern-leaves-garden

For most ecommerce stores, this URL structure is recommended, as it provides the necessary amount of flexibility while still making the website easy to handle.

Another URL structure you can see is the flat structure, where URLs are all independent of each other, and positioned very close to the homepage, using only a minimal amount of directories.

• domain.com
• domain.com/shop
• domain.com/category
• domain.com/subcategory
• domain.com/product
• domain.com/product/product variation 

Like Nike, for example:

• https://www.nike.com/men
• https://www.nike.com/w/mens-shoes-nik1zy7ok
• https://www.nike.com/w/mens-lifestyle-shoes-13jrmznik1zy7ok
• https://www.nike.com/t/dunk-low-se-mens-shoes-bG86Qc/HQ1519-030

You should notice here that while URLs are not nested in a folder structure, the structure is contained within the permalink. Each consecutive subcategory URL contains the name and identifier of its parent. 

This structure is great when each of your categories and subcategories are targeting specific keywords in search.

Another key benefit of a flat URL structure is you can change the organization of your content, experiment with different navigation options, and still keep your URLs the same.

The drawback is it becomes increasingly difficult to organize and manage these URLs the more your store grows. You can see how Nike is forced to use unique identifiers for each URL to aid tracking and management.

WooCommerce Store URL Structure

WooCommerce makes it easy to control the URL structure of your store. Simply navigate to the Permalinks settings in your WordPress dashboard and you’ll find options for your category, tag, and product URLs.

To avoid conflict with other URLs created by WordPress, WooCommerce requires a folder for each of the URL types – categories, tags, and products. 

• domain.com/category/category-name
• domain.com/tag/tag-name
• domain.com/product/product-name

You can use the defaults or add custom, but you cannot skip this folder (without hacking up your site – not recommended).

Shopify Store URL Structure

In contrast, Shopify gives you very little control over the URL structure. Users are limited to choosing the final slug of the product URL and the name of the category page (called Collections in Shopify).

For example, products are always created in the /products/ folder:

https://dowsedesign.co.uk/products/inka-stackable-cups

Collections are created in the /collections/ folder:

https://dowsedesign.co.uk/collections/ceramics

If you reach the product by browsing the store, you’ll end up with a dynamic URL, where the path you took around the website is reflected in the URL:

https://dowsedesign.co.uk/collections/ceramics/products/inka-stackable-cups

Don’t worry, this URL is canonicalized to the main product URL by default. More on that in the next section.

Choose Between Static vs. Dynamic URLs Wisely

Static URLs correspond to specific files or web pages on your server:

• Homepage
• Category page
• Product page
• Blog post
• Image 
• PDF

These URLs always remain the same. Search engines love static URLs because they are predictable and reliable. Naturally, all of your core pages and SEO targets should be static URLs.

Dynamic URLs are generated on the fly to return specific content requested by some type of script or database command. 

You’ll commonly see dynamic URLs serve numerous functions on ecommerce stores: 

Filter and Sort Products in a Category

You can commonly see dynamic URLs on category pages, with parameters and attributes appended at the end of the permalink, as different sorting options modify the product listings. 

https://www.cpooutlets.com/milling-machines?prefn1=turntoAverageRating&prefv1=4%20stars%20%26%20up&srule=top-sellers

Proper Cloth does it differently. After you visit one of the categories, the filters will add extra folders to the URL in the order you applied them:

https://propercloth.com/shop/pants/business/striped/wrinkle-resistant/medium-weight

Product Versions: 

Dynamic URLs can be used to display different versions of the same product: 

• https://propercloth.com/products/suede-leather-belt?style=chestnut&size-=belt-size-38-(waist-size-36)&ref=wornwith
• https://dowsedesign.co.uk/collections/ceramics/products/inka-stackable-cups?variant=41107778175063

Site Search:

Dynamic URLs are also used for search functions

https://sevensons.net/store?q=filet

Regardless of how or why they are generated, dynamic URLs usually don’t offer any unique content or value. 

Google can index them just fine, however, this may result in duplicate content issues and reduced search performance.

You can use the canonical tag to tell search engines they’re an extension of another static page. 

In most cases, adding a self-referencing canonical tag to every static page of your website would usually propagate that canonical tag to all dynamic URLs that sprout from it. 

CPO Outlets has a problem though. This dynamic URL is canonicalized to itself, where it should be canonicalized to the main category page:

https://www.cpooutlets.com/milling-machines?prefn1=turntoAverageRating&prefv1=4%20stars%20%26%20up&srule=top-sellers

Google figured it out and the URL above is not indexed. However, this may or may not happen for your site. You don’t want to rely on search engines to guess and sort through your URLs.

The Debate: Trailing Slash vs. Non-Trailing Slash

Trailing slashes ( / ) are used to separate different parts of the URL.

When you read about trailing slash vs non-trailing slash, people are referring to the last slash. 

• https://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/product → traditionally defines a file, like a web page
• https://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/product/ → traditionally defines a directory/folder

These are two distinct and equally valid URLs in the eyes of servers and search engines. 

You could have different content on both URLs and Google will accept them as separate pages. Of course, nobody ever wants to do this, and can actually be very hard to do in practice. 

What often happens is you have both versions of the page live with the same content. That’s duplicate content and while modern algorithms are usually smart enough to acknowledge they are on the same page, it’s a cardinal sin to leave it to chance. 

It doesn’t matter if you choose the trailing slash or non-trailing slash version. But you need to choose one and redirect the other. 

Also, make sure your internal linking is consistent with the URL version you pick. More on that later.

Subdomain vs. Subfolders: What’s Best for SEO?

Subdomains, as their name suggests, are typically considered to be separate from the root domain. Many blogging and hosting platforms provide free websites on a subdomain in their system. Remember BlogSpot? Anyone? 

You can put your store on a subdomain if it’s not the core of your website. For example, Scott’s Bass Lessons is an online course creator for bass players. The store is a side section, where they sell branded merch because it’s not part of their core offering:

https://shop.scottsbasslessons.com

The store uses its own design and template, and different architecture than the main site. It’s common for these side stores to use specific ecommerce platforms to facilitate product and cart functionalities. 

SBL is not trying to actively rank these pages and doesn’t rely on their revenue to sustain their business. So, it’s completely acceptable to keep the store on a subdomain and keep it from influencing the main site.

In contrast, subfolders are an inseparable part of the domain. Content in subfolders is discovered intuitively by search engines as they crawl each directory level and progress to the next. 

If your ecommerce store is your main business, your store and ecommerce platform should be set up on your root domain.

Mastering Click Depth for Better SEO

Search engine spiders (bots) crawl websites in a tree-like fashion:

• Read the entire page
• Evaluate for indexing
• Follow each hyperlink to discover new pages
• Repeat

Crawl depth is the minimum number of clicks a user or spider needs to make to reach a specific page, starting from the homepage.

• Your home page has a crawl depth of 0 
• Every page linked from the homepage and in the menu has a crawl depth of 1

There’s a notion in SEO that pages with high crawl depth have worse performance in search, compared to pages closer to the homepage. 

This is only partially true. Here’s what Google says:

“Your site’s home page is often the most important page on your site, and so pages linked directly to the home page may be seen as more important, and therefore crawled more often. However, this doesn’t mean that these pages will be ranked more highly than other pages on your site.“

In a technical sense, crawl depth is only a problem if your site has over a million pages. At this scale, Google must make decisions about which content it can crawl and how often. Pages too deep may get missed.

That said, crawling is not the only mechanism Google uses to discover content. A well-maintained sitemap will allow Google to reach every page of your site. Whether the algorithm decides it’s worthwhile to index and serve it in search is a different story. 

Crawl Depth Is Indicative of Internal Linking Problems

The higher the crawl depth of a page, the fewer internal links it receives, AND, the further away the sources of those links are from the homepage.

Links — internal or external — act as votes of confidence for search engines, passing authority from one page to the next. This mechanism was the foundation of PageRank — the first search ranking algorithm used by Google. 

While Google has long evolved from counting links, they are still a cornerstone in SEO.

Fortunately, crawl depth and internal linking are relatively easy to analyze with tools like Screaming Frog. 

Unfortunately, crawl depth problems can be more difficult to solve and frequently require extensive revisions to your navigation and page layouts. 

For example, you can reduce the crawl depth of your entire store by adding all your subcategories to the main menu. Or you can create additional widgets that interlink categories and products automatically.

Adding body content links to your products and category pages from other relevant content is a sure way to boost their crawl depth and performance in search.

The Importance of URL Consistency

If you’ve read the article this far you’ll know the below listed are all technically different URLs:

• https://yourstore.com/
• https://yourstore.com
• https://www.yourstore.com/
• https://www.yourstore.com

These should always resolve to the same URL using 301 redirects. After you’ve decided on your URL structure, you want to use the same URL version consistently everywhere on your site:

• Menus
• Widgets
• Text links
• Sitemaps
• Social media and any external links you can control
• Etc

Failure to do so will make browsers and crawlers add steps when fetching the page, wasting time and resources. 

It’s okay if you have a few rogue redirects here and there, and exceptions do apply. But it’s never okay to have all links in your main menu go through a redirect. This is a sure way to slow your site down and negatively affect its performance in search. 

Investigate high amounts of redirects found in Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.

Keep URLs Short and Sweet

URL length doesn’t really matter for SEO. 

Google doesn’t mind complex URLs, but users do.

From a user perspective, a shorter, easy-to-read URL is far more attractive than a URL full of parameters and technical folders.

From a management perspective, it’s much easier to work with shorter, legible, and logical URLs, than giant strings of characters. 

Let’s look at the examples below:

For product URLs: Try to make URLs easy to spell out over the phone. 

• Remove stop words
• Use keywords, but don’t overdo it
• Limit the use of folders in the final product URL 
• Limit the use of identifiers and parameters, where possible

For category URLs: The same rules apply. But you should also be mindful of keyword duplication.

For example – https://www.toolnation.com/cordless-power-tools/cordless-saws/cordless-jigsaws.html

Adding “cordless” 3 times isn’t going to help Tool Nation rank any better and is unnecessarily long. This URL can take two forms:

https://www.toolnation.com/cordless-power-tools/saws/jigsaws.html → Eliminate keyword duplication from subcategories. By extension, these tools are bound to be cordless. 

OR BETTER YET

https://www.toolnation.com/cordless-jigsaws.html → Remove the hierarchy structure and keep the keywords based on search targeting. It’s obvious to any visitor these tools belong to the “Saws” and “Cordless Power Tools” categories.

Elevate Your Ecommerce Success with Strategic URL Optimization

So that was ecommerce URL structures in a nutshell. A very, very long nutshell. 

What did we learn?

1. Good URL structures promote intuitive navigation and allow users and search engines to discover content effortlessly. Bad URL structures lead to bad user experiences, poor indexing and search performance, and ultimately fewer sales.
2. Dive into your URL structure BEFORE you choose your ecommerce platform and create your store. Migrations are pain for little gain.
   1. Nesting product URLs in their parent categories (hierarchical structure) can make your URLs rigid and hard to change. Also unnecessarily long. 
   2. Flat URL structures are very flexible but can be hard to manage for large stores. 
   3. Most consumer ecommerce platforms, like WordPress and Shopify, use a middle-ground solution where URLs are independent of each other but still utilize some folder structure. 
3. Navigation is just as important as structure. Good navigation and internal linking is key to getting the most out of any URL structure. 
4. Consistency in your URLs and internal links ensures users and search engines reach the right content efficiently – no detours and wasted time.
5. Call DCP.

Seriously, contact us if you have problems with your ecommerce store, URL structure, and SEO in general. We can help diagnose your website and guide you toward the most efficient path for organic growth and graphs like these:

Get in touch today!