(Entry was posted by Faith Duga on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/12/2018).

Is keeping the url short better for user experience?

hi,
I made a website 4 months ago and my url`s are long (same length of h1) .
Now I read keeping the url short is better for user experience..or in general it is better.
Can I change my URL or does it hurt my site (SEO) ? I didnt build any backlinks or like that.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Dave Elliott: I wouldn`t care much about my urls other than the home page to be honest.
Michael Martinez: You may see some turbulence in search referral data for a while but if you implement explicit 301 redirects you should be fine. By "explicit" I mean you use the "301" status code, not you tell some interface to redirect from A to B (they often default to 302 status codes because that is in the specifications).
Alan Bleiweiss: Unless you are writing entire novels for your H1s, I wouldn`t be concerned about this generally speaking. For most pages, a two, three or, at most, four word H1 "should" be sufficient, except for blog type posts and news articles where headlines are normally longer. Translated into URLs this is not unrealistic unless your news or blog titles are so long that just reading them as a human, they "feel" too long. In that case I`d consider shortening them not specifically because of URL length, but instead, readability. That then translates into more direct topical understanding by search algorithms.