When publishing a post on Passenger Content, if you don’t set a custom URL, one will be created for you based on the content title. 90% of the time, this will be all that you need to get a nice web address.
However, sometimes you might want to customise those web addresses. In that scenario, this article will help you in editing that path.
To change a page URL, tick ‘Custom URL Alias’ in the sidebar and choose a new URL. Bear in mind this will remove the old URL, so if you’ve already shared this page to others (such as on Twitter) it will stop working.
A note on key pages
Some key pages (such as Contact, or Mobile Ticket listing) have a custom path set for a specific reason. If you’re unsure, please contact your key Customer Success Manager.
Best practices
We want to pick a good URL for multiple reasons - for user readability and to help search engines understand the content of a page.
Most of your traffic will come from search engines, so it’s beneficial to do everything you can to help them understand your content.
Make a page address relevant to the content
Don’t use gibberish, don’t make it random numbers, and let users know what they’re in for before they tap the link.
Keep it simple
Avoid stuffing your URL with lots of keywords, and make it sensible - generally, anything above 5 words in the address and it’ll start to look a bit silly.
Use hyphens to separate words
We can’t use spaces in URLs, so a hyphen is the standard way of separating words. This makes it easier for people to read, and for Google and other search engines to understand.
Removing hyphens makes URLs incredibly difficult for people to read, and can cause people to misread words.
From Google Webmaster’s guidelines:
The URL example.com/green-dress is much more useful to us [Google] than example.com/greendress. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
Avoid stop words
You’ll notice Passenger Content will remove words like ‘of’, ‘and’, and ‘in’ from your page title when auto-generating the page URL. This is partly because search engines will ignore them.
However in some cases you might want these - for example, we often use them for ‘fares-and-tickets’ URLs. So this isn’t a hard rule.
Web browsers de-emphasise URLs beyond the domain
A growing trend in web browsers in recent years has been to reduce the importance of the full URL path and highlight the main domain instead. This is to help users determine that they’re on the correct website rather than a scam website.
Check your analytics to see how this might affect you - but generally, you’ll see about 40% of your users on Safari (iOS and Mac) and another 40% on Google Chrome, both of which de-emphasise full URLs.
- On Chrome and Firefox, elements of the address are faded out.
- On Safari, only the domain is shown.
This is worth bearing in mind when considering your URL path. This means in practice that most URLs are not worth perfecting and spending too much time on. Ensure the URL is accurate, then humans and search engines will have an easy time reading it.