URL Structure: Lower case VS Upper case

Question

Just trigger in my mind when I was going through some websites were they having upper case and lower case combination in url something like http://www.domain.com/Home/

Answer 1

I know you asked for technical reasons but it's also worth considering this from a UX perspective.

Say you have a URL with upper case characters and, for arguments sake, this has been distributed on printed media. When a user comes to enter that URL into their browser they may well be compelled to match that case (or be forced to match the specified case if your web server is case sensitive) ultimately you are giving them more work to do as they have to consider case as well. After all, they don't know if your server is case sensitive or not and they may have experienced 404s from case sensitive web servers in the past.

If your server is case sensitive and you are using mixed case URLs you are giving more scope for the user to mistype the URL. Furthermore, say you have the URL www.example.com/Contact. It's easy to confuse an upper and lower case "c" (especially if it is copied in hand writing) if the user overlooks this and uses the wrong case they may never reach your content.

With all this in mind consider www.example.com/News/Articles/FreeIceCreamForAll. On keyboard that's not too difficult but consider this on a mobile device, it would be very fiddly to input.

The reverse is also true should a user want to write down a URL from the address bar. They may feel they need to match the case, ultimately giving them more work to do and increasing the likelyhood of errors.

To conclude; keep URLs lower case.