Allowing to load web pages directly from browser and navigating through browser buttons?-CodePudding

Is it good to allow webpages to load directly from browser url field or browser back buttons?

Our webapplication is working fine if any user navigates through home page, but some users are directly accessing the web url in the browser and raising issues that it is not working fine.

Can you please suggest do we need to support loading the urls through browser or allow to navigate through home page?

Some banking websites gives a warning saying to do not use browser urls or browser buttons to navigate between pages i.e. they will warn to do not press browser back button to navigate to previous page etc., so is it correct idea then?

CodePudding user response：

Yes! Ideally, you should let your users use the links directly and have the website function as usually does. This is ideal if they use, for example, their "recent webpages" functionality on their browser, they want to revisit some page from their history, or they visit the webpage so often it appears on their recommended webpages list (This is a functionality present in some browsers, such as Chrome).

A good way to achieve this is query parameters.

Overall, you should expect your user to access the website from other places than the homepage, and have some logic to handle it in such a webpage that the website doesn't become broken.

However, there are some situations where it's just impossible to have the website work as expected without some previous action done by the user (For example, filling a form or being authenticated. In some cases, your user might need to be authenticated to visit a specific link, and ideally, because of security, user sessions should eventually expire). In this case, having safeguards that redirect the user to some previous page where they can begin their flow again (Such as, the login page) is better than nothing.

How to implement this depends a lot on the stack being used (Programming navigation varies between React and Angular. You might not even be using a library or framework at all!). More context would be needed to suggest an approach.