Sometimes you want to be able to send a simple link to a page on your website, without having a long url.

My blog title urls are always www.lucydesigns.ie/blog/the-name-of-the-blog-post which can be a bit unwieldy if you want to be able to verbally tell people to go to a certain page on your website. It’s a mouthful to repeat the entire url. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just direct people to a pretty link or a shortened link such as www.yourdomain.com/topic

Here’s a concrete example. I have a blog post about the Trading Online Voucher which has been very popular. The url is www.lucydesigns.ie/blog/trading-online-voucher By creating a pretty link, I can simply tell people to go to www.lucydesigns.ie/tov and they will be directed to right page.

So, how do we create this pretty link in Squarespace?

Go to Settings/Advanced/URL Mappings

Next, click on URL Mappings

This is where you direct your desired url to the destination page. You’ll see from the screenshot below the exact format to follow. In my case

/tov (the desired url, no need to put your domain name before the /) -> /blog/trading-online-voucher (the existing page) followed by 302 which indicates that this is a temporary redirect (in other words I might take it down or change it some time in the future).

The other redirects on my screenshot below are old pages that I am no longer using and which I wish to redirect to new pages so that anyone who should happen across the old link somewhere on the internet lands on the most relevant new page and not my 404 page. These redirects are marked 301 as they are permanent.

You may be wondering why I didn’t just use TOV as the original blog post url instead of trading-online-voucher. Well, I could have, except that I believe spelling out the entire phrase is better for SEO. In other words, more people will be searching for trading online voucher than simply tov.

Other instances of requiring a pretty link might include if you have an affiliate link for an app or software, for example. Usually the company you are affiliated with will give you a very long garbled link for you to send your audience to. This is impossible to memorise. For example, I am affiliated with Convertkit, the email app software. To direct my audience to my affiliate link, I just need to send them to www.lucydesigns.ie/convertkit and they land on the link that Convertkit supplied me with.