Page addresses
Every page of your website has its own address — just as every house on a street has its number. Here's how to choose a good one, why to leave it alone once it's published, and what to do when you rename or remove a page.
What a page address is
The address is the text at the top of the browser. The home page lives on the domain itself; other pages and articles have a little extra after the domain:
The configurator makes that extra part itself. For a page it builds it from the page title (the “Pages” group), for an article from the article title. It removes accents, replaces spaces with hyphens and writes everything in lower case. The title “Prices and dates” becomes prices-and-dates.html.
You can see the result in the “Address” field at every page and under the title of every article. Until you download the website for the first time, the address changes along with the title. You can also rewrite it yourself — then it stops following the title.
Some hosts, Cloudflare for example, show the address without .html at the end. Both forms lead to the same page; you don't need to do anything about it.
What a good address looks like
- Short — two to four words. The configurator shortens anything over 60 characters to whole words.
- Says what's on the page. Someone who sees it on a business card should know where it leads.
- No accents, words separated by hyphens — the configurator does this for you.
- No year and no words that age (“new”, “offer”, “2026”). The page will outlive them.
| Good address | Bad address | Why it's bad |
|---|---|---|
interior-painting.html | page-2.html | Says nothing about what's on the page. |
prices.html | prices-2026.html | In a year it will be wrong — and it shouldn't change any more. |
reviews.html | what-our-happy-customers-say-about-us.html | Too long; nobody types it in from a business card. |
contact.html | contact-new.html | In six months it won't be “new”. |
Why an address shouldn't change once it's published
Once the website is online, its addresses spread around the world. You don't know where they all are, and you can't tell any of those places that they've changed:
Notes the address and shows it to people searching for “interior painting” in your town.
Business card and van
A printed address can't be rewritten. The lettering on your van lasts for years.
A post
A link on Facebook or in a local group stays there for years.
Email to a client
“You'll find our prices here” — the client keeps the message and clicks it six months later.
That's why the configurator locks the address after the first download. If you rename the page after that, the address stays, and below the field you'll see a sentence saying the title changed and the address didn't. That's fine: visitors hardly read the address, they read the heading.
What happens if you change it anyway
Sometimes it makes sense — there's a typo in the address, or the page is now about something else. At the “Address” field click “Change address”, type the new one and confirm it with Enter.
The configurator then leaves a redirect at the old address, so neither visitors nor Google run into an error.
It's like a note on the door of your old workshop saying “We've moved” — except it carries the visitor straight to the new address. Whoever comes to the old address ends up at the new one without noticing. Google understands that the page has moved and carries over what it knew about the old address.
A redirect is not the same as making the page again. There's still one page with the same text — it just lives at a different address. If you added a new page instead of changing the address and kept the old one, you'd have two nearly identical pages: Google wouldn't know which to show, and you'd have to keep both up to date.
- You can see old addresses at the page in the list “These old addresses lead here:”.
- If you change the address a second time, both old addresses lead straight to the newest one.
- After the change, download the website again and upload the whole
webfolder. The redirect is part of it — until you upload it, it isn't online.
In the “Pages” group under “More settings” there is the option “Lead old addresses to the new ones”. If you set it to “No”, an old address ends in a “Not found” error — even a link from Google, a business card or Facebook.
Three situations — pick yours
Each needs a different solution. The most common mistake is using the solution from another situation.
You're renaming a page
redirectThe content stays, the title changes. For example “Prices” becomes “Prices and dates”.
Best of all, leave the address alone — prices.html can stay as it is. If you do change it, the configurator leaves a redirect at the old one. Don't make a new page.
The page is no longer needed
removeYou no longer offer the service — say you've stopped wallpapering.
Remove the page (“Remove page”). Its address then shows the “Not found” page with links to the home page and the menu. Don't force a redirect somewhere else, such as the home page: someone looking for wallpapering would land on the home page with no explanation. Google spots this anyway and treats it as an error.
An unfinished or private page
not on the web yetThe page isn't finished yet, or it's meant for one customer only.
The configurator doesn't yet have an option to hide a page from visitors. Every page you add is on the website once you upload it. So add an unfinished page only when it's done — until then write the text somewhere else, in your notes for example. Don't put private things on the website at all: a website is public, even if no link leads to the page.
If you switch this option off, the page only disappears from the menu. It's still on the website, and in the sitemap for Google too.
What noindex is and why it doesn't belong on an old address
noindex is a hidden note in a page for search engines: “don't show this page in search results”. The page is still on the website and anyone who knows the address can open it — Google just won't list it. Our website uses it, for example, on the “Not found” page, which nobody should be searching for.
The idea suggests itself: “I'll make a new page and hide the old one from Google with noindex.” It sounds sensible, but Google then drops the old page along with everything it knew about it, and the new one starts from zero. Anyone coming from your business card lands on the old page you no longer update.
A redirect, on the other hand, hands everything over to the new address. That's why the configurator doesn't put noindex on an old address.
When the website has more than one language
Each further language has its own folder on the website, named with the language code. In each language, the page address is built from the title in that language:
The language switcher on the website links these addresses. Someone on the English prices page who switches to Nederlands lands on the Dutch prices page, not on the home page. So that Google knows this too, fill in “Your website address” in the “Search engines (SEO)” group.
Everything in this guide applies to each language separately: the address locks after the download, and changing it leaves a redirect. Next to the “Address” field there are buttons with language codes (EN, NL…) — they switch which language's address you see and change.