A URL refers to the address of the webpage you’re on. It stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but you don’t need to know that. What you do need to know is that a URL tells your browser where to request a webpage. URLs are composed of several parts, broken up by periods or slashes. For example, the URL for this webpage is:
https://clear.design/learn/url/We’ll cover the beginning of the URL, the https://, another time. Let’s start with the Domain Name in the middle of it – clear.design. This part of the URL lets your browser zero in on the computer that is home to a particular website. The next part, /learn/, is telling that computer what folder to look in for the webpage you requested. If there were no more instructions after this, it would automatically request the index file from that folder. But there is another instruction – /url/! So the computer looks for the url folder inside of the learn folder. Now, there are no more instructions, so the computer requests the index file from the url folder, and you see this webpage.
This means that when you type in a domain name on its own with nothing else after it, you’re requesting the very first index file from that website. This part of the file name is often left implied by the web browser, and not explicitly shown.
There is much more to learn about URLs, but I’ll leave that for another time. For now, understanding how they communicate the address of a webpage is the most important part.