Configuring Your Site’s Friendly URL
Friendly URLs are readable URLs that can help users quickly access your site. Each URL must be unique and is appended to https://localhost:8080/web (e.g., https://localhost:8080/web/helloworld/). You can change this /web default and remove it from public site URLs. See Removing /web from Public Site URLs.
When private pages are enabled, you can set friendly URLs for them as well. Once set, they are appended to https://localhost:8080/group.
Setting a Site’s Friendly URL
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Open the Site Menu (
), expand Configuration, and go to Site Settings → Site Configuration → Site URL. -
Enter a Friendly URL.
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Click Save.
If you want to add a friendly URL for your site’s home page, follow the additional steps in the next section.
Setting Your Instance’s Home URL
The home URL refers to the default URL or path where users are sent when they access the base URL of the Liferay instance, such as http://localhost:8080.
If you add a friendly URL for your instance’s home page, you should update your instance’s home URL field so page requests to the home URL redirect properly. Failing to do so may cause inconsistencies between the URL paths, redirect problems, and broken links.
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Open the Global Menu (
) and navigate to Control Panel → Instance Settings. -
Select Instance Configuration under the Platform heading and click the General link.
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Under Navigation, enter your new friendly home URL into the Home URL field. For example, setting the friendly URL of your default site to
/my-sitemakes your site’s public home page’s URLhttps://localhost:8080/web/my-site/home. So, you would enter/web/my-site/home. Withlayout.friendly.url.public.servlet.mapping.enabledset tofalse, this path becomes/my-site/home, and you would enter that value instead.
Once you’ve entered this setting, page requests to localhost:8080 redirect to the friendly URL of your Liferay DXP instance’s new home page.
Removing /web from Public Site URLs
Liferay DXP 2026.Q2+
The layout.friendly.url.public.servlet.mapping.enabled property controls whether public site friendly URLs include the /web fragment. It defaults to true, which keeps /web in the path. Setting it to false removes the fragment, so example.com/web/marketing/campaigns becomes example.com/marketing/campaigns. The property is instance-wide: it changes URLs for every public site on the instance and cannot be applied to individual sites.
Set this property to false for new sites only. Because it is instance-wide, enable it only on an instance whose public sites have no /web URLs indexed by search engines. On an existing site with indexed /web URLs, setting the property to false does not redirect or remove those URLs, so both the old /web URLs and the new clean URLs stay live, and search engines can treat them as duplicate content and dilute the site’s ranking. A new site has no indexed /web URLs, so it carries no duplicate content risk.
Removing /web also introduces a URL collision risk. Without /web, two site paths can resolve to the same URL, and so can a site path and a reserved system path.
Liferay DXP 2026.Q3+Before setting the property tofalse, run the Server Administration checker to find these conflicts. See [Checking for Friendly URL Conflicts](../../../security-and-administration/administration/using-the-server-administration-panel/checking-for-friendly-url-conflicts.md). Reserved system paths come from thesites.friendly.url.keywordsportal property, which includes values such asweb,group, anddocuments. See Portal Properties.
Set this property in a portal-ext.properties file. There is no Control Panel toggle. Add this line and restart Liferay DXP to apply it:
layout.friendly.url.public.servlet.mapping.enabled=false
Old /web/... paths keep working after the change. The property adds a shorter path; it does not remove or redirect /web. Canonical tags, sitemaps, and social meta tags (including Open Graph) reflect the clean form, with no extra configuration. Sites already using a site-level virtual host are unaffected, since virtual host resolution takes priority over friendly URL mapping.