Set up your content for hierarchical URLs

Hierarchical URLs, an alternative to flat URLs, are especially useful for knowledge portals, intranets, and websites with nested content. For example:

• Hierarchical URLs can look like /content-model/content-types/introduction.
• Flat URLs can look like /introduction-to-content-types.

Adding hierarchy to your URLs offers many benefits:

• Better SEO: Search engines favor descriptive URLs with clear hierarchies, which can improve page rankings.
• User trust: Clean and hierarchical URLs appear more professional and trustworthy.
• Improved usability: Users can navigate easily and understand their location within the site, enhancing the overall user experience.
• Contextual relevance: Hierarchical URLs provide context about the page content, helping users predict what to expect.
• Data analysis: Hierarchical URLs make it easier to drill down into your web analytics section by section.

Remember that your URL hierarchy doesn’t need to reflect your content hierarchy one-to-one. Consider your project’s requirements, SEO goals, and the comfort level of your content creators when choosing the best method for implementing hierarchical URLs in Kontent.ai.

Approach A: Use Live Preview for content hierarchy and URL generation

Live preview lets content creators see their content changes directly within content items, providing an in-context visual of your website structure while editing in real time. By using live preview, you can also manage your website’s information architecture as a hierarchical tree. Your web app then uses this structure to generate hierarchical URLs automatically. You construct hierarchical URLs by using parent-child relationships between content items. Each content item links to a parent item, and the web app combines the URL slugs from each level to form the full path.

Approach B: Semi-hierarchical URLs based on content metadata

For semi-hierarchical short URLs, assign a URL prefix based on the content type, such as, /articles/ or /blogs/, and append the URL slug from each content item. This approach can also work with taxonomies.

Approach C: Full relative URLs stored in content items

Add a text element to each content item where the full relative URL path is manually specified. Your web app uses this exact value directly when generating URLs.