URL Length Checker
Paste a list of URLs and get length, depth, parameters and the specific things — uppercase, underscores, session ids, dates — that make each one harder to crawl and uglier to link to.
Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.
What a long URL actually costs you
Not rankings. There is no length at which a URL starts ranking worse, and the 75-character figure that circulates in checklists is not a threshold any search engine applies. What a long URL costs is smaller and more real:
- It gets truncated in results. Google shows a breadcrumb rather than the raw URL on most results now, but where the URL does show, the middle of a long one is replaced with an ellipsis, and whatever was descriptive about it goes with it.
- It gets copied wrong. URLs are pasted into emails, Slack, forum posts and CMS fields that wrap or auto-link them. A long URL with parameters is the one that arrives broken, and a broken link is a link you did not get.
- It is harder to say out loud. Which matters more than it sounds for anything that goes in a podcast, a slide, or a conversation with a journalist.
- 2,048 characters is a real ceiling. It is the oldest and lowest of the common browser and server limits, and past it behaviour stops being predictable — truncation, 414 responses, or a URL that works in one client and not another. Nothing sane comes near it, but generated faceted URLs sometimes do.
The flags, and which ones matter
Uppercase letters in a path are the one to fix first. Hostnames are case-insensitive; paths are not. /Products and /products are two URLs to a web server, and if both resolve you have duplicated every page under them. Underscores are a smaller thing: word separators in URLs are best as hyphens, and underscores were historically not treated as separators at all, so link_building could be read as one token. Both are worth getting right on new URLs and rarely worth a migration on old ones.
Session ids and tracking parameters in an indexable URL are the expensive flag. Every unique parameter value is potentially a separate URL to crawl, which is how a 500-page site turns into 400,000 crawlable URLs. Dates in paths age a page whether or not the content has: a 2019 in the URL makes the page look stale in the results and makes it awkward to update later without breaking the link. File extensions leak the implementation and make a platform migration a redirect project.
When not to change a URL
A URL that ranks and has links pointing at it is worth more dirty than clean. Changing it means a redirect, and a redirect means a small permanent loss plus a period of instability, in exchange for cosmetics. Fix URLs at the template level so new pages come out right, migrate the ones that are genuinely broken — duplicated by case, or carrying a session id into the index — and leave the ugly-but-working ones alone.
Questions people ask
Is there an ideal URL length?
Short enough to read at a glance and specific enough to say what the page is. In practice that is a domain plus one or two descriptive segments. Anything beyond that is a taxonomy decision, not an SEO one — and no length costs you rankings on its own.
Do keywords in the URL help?
A little, and much less than people assume. A descriptive URL helps a human decide whether to click a link pasted in a message, and it gives the page a sensible anchor when someone links to the bare URL. Stuffing extra keywords into the path does nothing beyond making the URL longer.
Should URLs have a trailing slash?
Pick one and be consistent. With a slash and without are two different URLs, and a site that serves both without redirecting has duplicated itself. The choice between them does not matter; having two live versions does.
What about non-English characters in URLs?
They work, and they are worth using for a non-English audience — a Cyrillic or Armenian URL reads correctly to the people the page is for. Be aware that the URL will appear percent-encoded in logs, analytics and anywhere it is copied, which turns one readable word into forty characters of noise.
Are my URLs sent anywhere?
No. The parsing happens in your browser, nothing is fetched and nothing is stored. You can paste a list of unpublished URLs safely.
Related tools
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