Absolute URL Report

As part of the migration and launch process, the DX team will provide your web team with an absolute URL report spreadsheet. The report tells you whether there are any links to your staging server (pantheon.io), and where. 

You can use this information to improve your site before launch and help site visitors avoid broken links. Update any links that contain reference to the staging server to internal, relative URLs using the LinkIt tool.

The DX team runs absolute URL reports every Thursday. We’ll send your team these reports three times during the process leading up to your site launch:

  1. Early in manual migration process, or once at least ten pages have been created
  2. A bulk audit, once the majority of content has been migrated
  3. A final check one week before launch

What to do

If the report finds absolute URLs on your site, it may mean that there are links pointing to the staging server (pantheon.io).

Update any absolute URLs using the LinkIt tool in any link field. This ensures that the link is pointing to the right page.

It’s OK if there are absolute URLs to other websites outside of your agency’s site, such as https://www.census.gov. 

how to link to google documents

Please refer to our how to link internal and external links page for further guidance on using the linkit tool. 

Absolute vs relative URLs

  • A URL, or uniform resource locator, is a web address
  • An absolute URL is one that contains a whole web address, including the https://. An absolute URL looks like this: https://www.iowa.gov.
  • A relative URL is one that contains only the path to the page, document, or file it is referencing. A relative URL looks like this: /topics/assistance-programs.

Identifying and Fixing Broken Links