Url too long

[KellyDSD86]

Hi we have a wordpress website for Office Furniture

Our domain name does not have office furniture in it.

So we went from having domain.com/shop/category/second-sub-cat

to domain.com/office-furniture/category/second-category

However we now have 509 products flagged with too long urls

I am wondering whether we should change back :

For example domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks

Should I go back to domain.com/shop/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks

Or am I going to confuse matters even more?

I should say this only affects categories as the products themselves are /shop/product

I am just concerned that changing the re-direct in place originally will just make matters worse and confuse things - would I get more value changing back? Or should I stick with it and just try to shorten urls individually by product titles etc

[sarahwalsh]

if the URL is too long, then what you have to think is it too long to mention on a business card?

Could it be used on the side of a van?

So, if you are just about to start a business, you might want to use a shorter URL because it's easy to remember if it's written on, say, a company card

[HashtagHustler]

I agree with Gaston 100%... not only that but changing your URL is not only a major pain in the butt, if not done properly can severely hurt your SEO.

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

There is nothing to worry about URL length. It was said by John Mueller that: SHORTER URLS AREN'T GIVEN PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT IN SEARCH - Deepcrawl Webmasters Hangouts notes 07/13/18

That said, I'd suggest you stick with the current URL structure. Think as Google likes coherence, so having a well-designed architecture in your information serves well to Google, although Google Search Algorithms can understand both structures.
Yeap, don't change too much your structure, like 301 redirects cause Google to spend more time and you could be having redirect chains that if goes higher than 5 hops Google bot will stop crawling them.

If you still mind about long URLs, think on how some subfolders names can be shrunk and avoid repeating words. Look at the example you gave us: domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks
 2x office, 2x corner, 2x desks, it could probably be like domain.com/office-furniture/corner-desks/beech

Hope it helps.
Best luck
GR