What is a URL?

Here is a URL with every part it can have:

https://shop.yourbusiness.co.ke/products/blue-shirt?size=m#reviews

• https:// — the scheme. How the browser should talk to the server. Always https now
• shop. — the subdomain, a division of your own domain
• yourbusiness.co.ke — the domain, the part you registered
• /products/blue-shirt — the path, which page on the site
• ?size=m — the query string, extra instructions for the page
• #reviews — the fragment, a section to jump to on that page

Only the scheme and the domain are required. Everything else is optional.

They are not the same thing, though people use them interchangeably.

The domain is yourbusiness.co.ke — the name you register and renew. The URL is the full address of one specific page, which includes the domain plus everything else.

One domain has one owner and thousands of URLs: every page, every product, every blog post has its own.

The s means the connection is encrypted. Without it, anything typed into the page — a password, a card number, a contact form — travels in plain text across every network in between.

Browsers now mark plain http sites as Not secure in the address bar, and search engines treat https as a ranking signal. There is no reason to be without it: a certificate is free, included on every plan here, and renews itself.

If your site still loads on http, that is worth fixing today rather than this quarter.

• Short and readable. /blue-shirt beats /product.php?id=4471
• Words, not IDs. Both people and search engines read the path
• Hyphens between words, not underscores or spaces
• Lower case, because some servers treat case as significant and it avoids confusion
• Stable. Changing a URL breaks every link to it; if you must, redirect the old one

Most content management systems can be told to generate URLs like that. It is a setting worth finding before you publish fifty pages, not after.