Relative URLs are the best possible option when making the choice between using an absolute URL or a relative URL. A relative URL indicates the location of a file or page with respect to the URL of the present page or location, then necessarily the URL will be shorter and more to the point, avoiding writing out the whole complex domain name and path. Thus, relative URLs are easier to manage and update when the domain or server is changed. For example: If the present page is www.example.com/products/widgets.html, and you want to link to its companion in the same directory called gadgets.html, then the relative URL would simply be gadgets.html, while the absolute would be www.example.com/products/gadgets.html. Relative URLs would be preferred for internal linking within a site as a whole for the fact that they might not break too easily when changes occur in the site structure. They would also allow staging a website on a dev server and subsequently moving such a site to a live server without the need to update every internal link. The best practice, when it comes to developing a website, is to use relative paths. The reason is that such action will actually lead to better maintainability in the context of the surrounding website.