Request a short or ‘friendly’ URL

You can raise a digital experience work request on ewokplus for a short or ‘friendly’ URL. 

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This service is only available for internal staff.

You will need to tell us:

• the reason you need a short URL
• the content or page the short URL will link to
• how your short URL will be used in marketing and promotion - the channels you will be using, the number of users who will be targeted
• what the main message will be in your marketing and communications

We will work with you to decide on the short URL. You can make suggestions - but they should meet GOV.UKs URL standards.

Short URLs can link to:

• internal Woking.gov.uk pages, for example /housing/council-tenants/pay-your-housing-rent/ways-pay-your-housing-rent/pay-your-housing-rent-direct-debit
• external Woking.gov.uk sub-domains, for example https://wokingsays.woking.gov.uk/

Reasons you might need a short URL

URLs should be easy to read. If you have a long, complex web address, you may want to set up a short URL.

Short URLs should be used to:

• share or promote guidance and services offline, for example in letters or on posters
• promote topics, schemes or campaigns, for example in TV, radio and in print

If the short URL is being read aloud, you should avoid using dashes as this can be harder to understand. If the short URL is only being used in written form, you should include dashes to help with readability. We can create versions of the short URL with and without dashes.

When your short URL goes live

We will create the short URL once the page it is pointing to goes live. Let us know if there is a strict deadline on when the page and short URL must go live.

Because short URLs can only point to live content, please do not publicise the short URLs until both the content and the short URL are live. If you do it before they’re live, you’ll send your users to a ‘This page cannot be found’ error page.

We may pre-approve a short URL if you can share a draft of the page before it goes live.

What happens next

You will get a confirmation email with a work request reference number. 

You can track the progress of your request by viewing our website work requests log.

You can also read how we prioritised requests and how long we may take.