Maximum Length of a website address / URL

Short story about maximum URL length

Make sure your URLs aren’t longer than 2’000 characters

Long Story about the maximum URL length

As a web developer you’ve probably seen a GET method request a few times. If you have a form and submit it, all the parameters including their values are appended to the browser URL. The more parameters you have to longer the address gets. You can use a POST method if you want to transfer more data but a GET request has the benefit of being link-able – you can copy the whole address and send it to anyone.

While you might want to avoid that in certain cases due to aesthetic reasons, there’s also a technical limit.

The standard RFC2616 specified that your URL should not exceed 255 bytes, check 3.2.1 in this document: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html.

It turns out that you can use up to 2’000 characters and it also turns out that someone had a closer look. Check this page more information http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html




3 Comments

Thanks for the link! I didn’t even check but I guess most questions are already answers somewhere somehow..

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