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Filters in the URL

Shareable filtered views, pre-filtered links from your navigation, and how the loop reads filters from the address bar.

3 min readUpdated 2026-08-15

Two independent switches on the Diamond Loop control the relationship between your filters and the address bar. They solve different problems and you can use either, both or neither.

Writing filters to the URL

Show filters in the address bar puts the active filters into the URL as the shopper changes them.

Turn it on when you want:

  • Shareable views. A shopper who filtered to 1.00–1.50ct emeralds can send that link to their partner and it opens the same grid.
  • Bookmarkable searches. The browser's back button behaves the way people expect.
  • Analytics you can read. Your reports show which filter combinations get traffic, because they are distinct URLs.

Turn it off when you would rather keep the address bar clean, or when a marketing campaign needs a single canonical URL for the catalogue.

Reading filters from the URL

Read filters from URL is the reverse: the loop applies the filters already in the address when the page loads.

This is what makes pre-filtered links work — the "Round diamonds" item in your navigation, a "Lab-grown under £2,000" button in a campaign, a link from a blog post about emerald cuts. Point them at your catalogue page with the filters in the query string and the grid opens filtered.

The engine reads keys like:

?shapes=round
?shapes=emerald,oval&color=d,e,f
?carat_min=1.00&carat_max=1.50
?labgrown=true
?orderby=price&order=asc

Using both together

Turning both on is the usual choice for a catalogue: incoming links open pre-filtered, and anything the shopper changes from there stays shareable.

The one combination worth thinking about is read on, write off — links open filtered, but the URL then stops reflecting what the shopper does. That is deliberate when you want campaign URLs to stay clean in analytics.

Filters and page caching

Filtered views are just URLs with query strings, and full-page caches treat them as separate pages. That is fine and often desirable.

The catalogue and diamond pages are rendered visitor-neutral, so they are safe to cache — the per-visitor parts (wishlist, compare, view mode) are applied in the browser after load. Nothing about filters in the URL changes that.

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