My Mom Uses a URL Encoder Now (Here\x27s Why)
No, my mom isn\x27t a developer. But she ran into a problem that only a URL encoder could solve — and now she\x27s the one teaching me things.
My mom is many things: an excellent cook, a terrifying Mahjong player, and a woman who once called the IT help desk because her monitor was unplugged. She is not, by any stretch, a power user.
So when I got a text from her at 9:47 PM saying "Vi, what's a URL encoder?" I assumed she'd clicked on a scam link. Turns out, she was smarter than me. Again.
The Crisis
My mom runs a small Etsy shop selling handmade embroidery patterns. She links to tutorials on her social media, and one of her listings had a title with special characters: "Cozy Cabin Embroidery Kit — Christmas Special (2026 Edition)". She pasted that into a URL, and — surprise — the link broke. The dashes, the parentheses, the ampersand-equivalent drama — it all turned into a garbled mess.
Customers were clicking and getting 404s. She was losing sales. To my mom, this was a crisis on the level of a burned Thanksgiving turkey.
Enter the URL Encoder
I sent her the link to our URL encoder / decoder. She typed in her listing name, hit encode, and out came:
Cozy%20Cabin%20Embroidery%20Kit%20%E2%80%94%20Christmas%20Special%20%282026%20Edition%29
She stared at it. She stared at me (digitally). She said, "That's hideous. But it works?"
It worked. She copied the encoded string into her link, and boom — the link didn't break. No more 404s. Her customers could actually buy things.
Now She Encodes Everything
Here's the part that makes me laugh. My mom, the woman who once asked if "the Google" needed updating, now runs every link through the URL encoder before posting. She's encoded product names, blog post titles, and — I'm not kidding — a tweet with a smiley face in it. She called me last week and said, "Vi, I found another website that uses percent signs for spaces. They stole your idea."
I didn't have the heart to explain how URL encoding works. She's happy. She feels like she's discovered a secret code. And honestly? She kind of has.
The Takeaway
URL encoding isn't just for developers debugging API calls. If you've ever shared a link that had a space, an emoji, or literally any punctuation in it, you've probably encountered the silent killer of broken URLs. A simple encode/decode tool is one of those things you don't think you need — until your Etsy shop is losing money because of a parenthesis.
Try the URL encoder. Even if you're not a dev. Your mom would approve.