URL Mapping On Squarespace & Why It’s Important For SEO
What Is A URL Slug?
Each page on your site has a unique path, this is the part of the URL after your main domain. For example my domain is abibacon.com and the unique URL Slug for my Plugins page is /plugins making the URL for that specific page abibacon.com/plugins. URL Slugs are made up of lower case letters and hyphens.
What Makes A Good URL Slug?
Readable: URL slugs should be readable, so not just a string of random letters, this helps users understand the context of the page by the URL. This is also useful when people share links of your site, as links look a lot more legitimate when readable and not just a jumble of letters.
SEO: Your URL slugs should not only be readable, but they should be relevant to the page their connected to. You’ll want to ensure you’ve included a keyword or two from the page in the slug so that Search Engines understand the context of the page whilst indexing. This can in turn boost your Search Ranking.
Common Practise: An ideal URL slug consists of three to five words, seperated by hyphens.
What Is URL Mapping?
On Squarespace we’re provided with a URL Mapping area, this is where we can set up redirects from urls’s that no longer exist to another destination.
If you’re changing the URL slug of a page to hopefully improve your sites SEO it’s important to set up a redirect from the old URL to the new one. We need to do this incase a Search Engine has already indexed the previous URL, or if other websites are linking to your previous URL. Users following these outdated links would then be directed to your 404 page, which isn’t ideal, we want to ensure they get to the most relevant page they can.
301 vs 302 Redirects
When you’re setting up your URL Mapping you’ll need to state whether you’re using a 301 or 302 redirect. A 301 Redirect is a permanent change, whereas a 302 Redirect is only temporary. In most cases it’s likely a 301 Redirect that you’ll want to be using.
How To Set Up URL Redirects
You’ll want to navigate to the URL Mappings menu within Squarespace, you can get there via Settings > Developer Tools > URL Mappings. Alternatively you can enter ‘URL Mappings’ into the search area at the top of the Squarespace menu.
Let’s say you have a page with the URL /services and you’ve changed the URL to /web-development-services your URL redirect will look like the below -
/services -> /web-development-services 301
If you’re changing the URL of a Blog Collection you don’t need to individually set up a redirect for all of your Blog Posts. Instead say you had a Blog with the URL /blog and you’d like to update it to /resources you can use the below structure -
/blog/[name] -> /resources/[name] 301
