When you work with website developers, you can often come across specific jargon such as slugs, URLs, links, sURLs, urls - let's take it all in stride.
URL or link is often the same thing for the user, but the task of the link is to take you to the right place, to the exact place on the network, but the URL is a more technical definition and actually contains all the technical information about the place where you plan to go.
So URL - includes:
- protocol - https, http, ftp, ssh;
- subdomain - the value is separated from the main domain by “.” (for example, subdomain.domain.com);
- domain name - the main value of the unique location;
- domain zone - respectively, the zone where this name is stored/processed;
- path - the name of the folder/directory within the site where the user will be redirected
Together, this makes up a URL and fulfills the key task of building connections across the entire Internet.
In contrast to URLs, a link is literally a function of redirecting a user to the desired URL. A link can be embedded in a single word or in a button on a website, but it will always be a function of directing a user to the desired URL.
Slug is an ideological continuation of the term URL, but it is focused on users. If you've ever tried to transfer large links to online stores, you've probably encountered the problem of large URLs, because such links contain category names, filters, meta tags, and technical parameters. Some systems such as Wordpress generate pages with IDs, so blog pages can look like this: blog.loc/82401-12, which is extremely inconvenient for the user. Therefore, the slug is designed to make the URL readable for the user. Usually it is formed directly from the H1 or title of the page, and is transliterated in the case of Cyrillic titles.
Pay attention to the slug of this article in the address bar. This is a literally formed url that is easy to read for an ordinary user.
surl - short for short url - is another way to conveniently transfer long urls between users on the network. We mentioned above that one url can contain hundreds of characters. It's impossible to memorize, and such a link can be cut by the messenger. In this case, we recommend using link shorteners. They store your long link and its short surl counterpart in their database. When a user clicks on such a short link, the shortener's server will receive a request and redirect the user to the desired long address. Such a short address can contain all the necessary parameters and be of almost any size, which will not affect the final short link in any way.