In the past, I wrote about how I used self-healing URLs. But while rewriting my website for the roughly the sixth time, a realization hit me: who am I really building this for?
That question completely shifted how I approached my site. I had been optimizing for SEO, but the real purpose of my site is self-documentation and sharing what I learn with others who want to learn alongside me.
With that in mind, I decided to delete the self-healing URLs. I no longer wanted to cater to machines—I wanted to build for people. Self-healing URLs are inherently anti-user. How is a human supposed to remember which number blog post this is? Or worse, if it’s just a random string?
Maybe this will prompt you to remove your self-healing URLs… or maybe it won’t :D