URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is a unique address that identifies a web site or document on the Internet.
When you type a URL into your browser, the browser automatically sends a request to the web site or document at the specified address.
A URL can be either an absolute or relative URL. An absolute URL begins with a fully qualified domain name, such as www.yahoo.com, while a relative URL begins with a domain name that has been shortened, such as www.yoursite.com.
When you create a URL, you must include the protocol (http:// or https://), hostname (the domain name of your web server), and port number (80 for HTTP traffic and 443 for HTTPS traffic). You can also include the file name if it’s more than one word, followed by the extension (.
htm for HTML files and .pdf for PDF files).
The final component of a URL is the pathname. The pathname is simply the sequence of directory names and file names that leads from your domain name to the file you want.
For example, if you want to visit www.google.com in your browser, you would type www.google.com in your address bar and press Enter. The browser would then send a request to Google’s web server at http://www.google.com and receive back the Google homepage in response.