Title: How Does It Work? Last modified: August 30, 2016 --- # How Does It Work? * Resolved [Off Pavement](https://wordpress.org/support/users/off-pavement/) * (@off-pavement) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/) * I’ve searched but can’t come up with any sort of published answer… * I would like to know how WP handles internal links. Should internal links have the fully qualified path name, or only the actual internal URL. * Example… * [http://www.myexamplewebsiteurl.com/testingpage/](http://www.myexamplewebsiteurl.com/testingpage/) or /testingpage/ Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total) * [Digico Paris](https://wordpress.org/support/users/digico-paris/) * (@digico-paris) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583292) * Pages can be organized in hierarchy: * Example, you create one page called vegetables. * Then you create a page called carrots. * Another one called potato. * Then you can, if you want, put both as child pages of vegetables. * In most templates, it will create a menu like: vegetables > carrots vegetables > potato * [Digico Paris](https://wordpress.org/support/users/digico-paris/) * (@digico-paris) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583294) * You can even go down to 3 levels * like vegetables > potato > white potato * it’s very flexible, one page can be a child of several parents too, you can even create custom taxonomies for that end * links works the very same, if you use **pages, NOT posts** it would look like: * yoursite.com/vegetables/potato/white-potato * as SERP * Thread Starter [Off Pavement](https://wordpress.org/support/users/off-pavement/) * (@off-pavement) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583296) * yoursite.com/vegetables/potato/white-potato * In your example, by using the “yoursite.com” as part of the address, does WP route the request to an external router or does it strip the “yoursite.com” and handle the request internally? * [Digico Paris](https://wordpress.org/support/users/digico-paris/) * (@digico-paris) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583297) * MMM, that is done in many parts, following worldwide internet backbones: * **Theory:** 1. worldwide DNS region DNS country DNS your host DNS your host server * **WordPress:** - your host server, handling request .htaccess if on Linux based server, rewriting process, checking auths reading mysql db to fetch text reading cache if used by Apache or Nginx (if cache plugins, or minify solutions, trying to read) DOM checking JS calls, Google fonts such things Calling php and dynamic stuff Finally rendering page (more or less async) * [Digico Paris](https://wordpress.org/support/users/digico-paris/) * (@digico-paris) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583298) * If you use a private host (not wordpress.com), this will follow a similar path more or less. * I don’t know if WordPress strip internally urls, but it’s called slug for a long time. Way before pages existed. I do know the additional processing of “perfect seo” urls put more cpu at hand. Like with all databases, the less paramater, the longer load time. * [Digico Paris](https://wordpress.org/support/users/digico-paris/) * (@digico-paris) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583299) * After if you are a coder, check this, this is how WordPress works internally when php is called * > [View post on imgur.com](https://imgur.com/XUgz1xN) * [Digico Paris](https://wordpress.org/support/users/digico-paris/) * (@digico-paris) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583303) * In the example, pages use a quite hard rewriting url process (they are basically posts with an id). So carrots page was in the process something like p=65146? something. * [catacaustic](https://wordpress.org/support/users/catacaustic/) * (@catacaustic) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583330) * > In your example, by using the “yoursite.com” as part of the address, does WP > route the request to an external router or does it strip the “yoursite.com” > and handle the request internally? * WordPress doesn’t do the routing. Your browser does. * As a standard, WordPress outputs all links including internal links as complete URI’s. This was a very early on design decision, mainly to make it easier for browsers. The difference is that some older browsers could get messed up if you have relative links, where as complete links always resolved to the correct location. * It’s also a whole lot eaiser for us humans to read as well. There’s a big difference in knowing where `http://www.mysite.com/folder/image.jpg/` will be located vs.`../../ folder/image.jpg`. When you’re editing pages, and especially changing any item in a hierachy, managing relative links becomes a nightmare very quickly. * Thread Starter [Off Pavement](https://wordpress.org/support/users/off-pavement/) * (@off-pavement) * [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583480) * Thanks for the replys. Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total) The topic ‘How Does It Work?’ is closed to new replies. * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/) * 9 replies * 3 participants * Last reply from: [Off Pavement](https://wordpress.org/support/users/off-pavement/) * Last activity: [10 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-does-it-work-46/#post-6583480) * Status: resolved ## Topics ### Topics with no replies ### Non-support topics ### Resolved topics ### Unresolved topics ### All topics