Free SEO ToolsURL Encoder/Decoder

URL Encoder/Decoder

Convert text to URL-safe format and back. Essential for developers and SEO pros.

Common URL-Encoded Characters:

Space: %20
!: %21
": %22
#: %23
$: %24
%: %25
&: %26
/: %2F

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URLs may only contain a limited set of characters. Everything else — spaces, accents, ampersands, non-Latin scripts — has to be percent-encoded, or the link silently breaks somewhere between your page and the server.

When you need encoding

Building query strings with user input, passing URLs as parameters inside other URLs, constructing UTM-tagged campaign links, and handling any path containing non-ASCII characters. An unencoded ampersand inside a parameter value truncates everything after it.

Decoding is equally useful for reading analytics reports and server logs, where URLs arrive fully encoded and become unreadable.

URLs and SEO

Prefer URLs that never need encoding: lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII, and short. Encoded characters make URLs unreadable in search results and harder to share, and inconsistent encoding of the same path can produce duplicate URLs pointing at one page.

If you use internationalised paths, make sure the canonical tag uses exactly one encoding form so the duplicates consolidate.

Related

Frequently Asked Questions

URL encoding (also called percent-encoding) converts characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet. Special characters like spaces, !, ?, and & are replaced with % followed by hexadecimal values.

Use URL encoding when passing data in query strings or URLs. For example, if you want to pass 'Hello World!' as a parameter, it should be encoded to 'Hello%20World%21' to avoid breaking the URL structure.

URL encoding specifically converts characters to %XX format for URLs. HTML escaping (e.g., &lt; for <) is different and used for displaying content safely in HTML. This tool focuses on URL encoding/decoding.

Yes! This tool runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript's built-in encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent functions. No data is sent to any server, ensuring your privacy.

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