How to Display Dynamic Content on a Page Using URL Parameters

In this tutorial, I will show you how to show/hide dynamic content based on URL parameters for any web page. This solution uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead of backend coding, so you will be able to use it with Marketo, Pardot, or any other system that allows a bit of custom code.

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The HTML

Wrap each one of your dynamic content sections in a DIV and add a class called dynamic-content. Also, give each DIV a unique ID. We will reference these later in the JavaScript.



  This is the default content



  I like apples



  I like oranges



  I like bananas

The CSS

There’s only one line of CSS needed to hide all the elements on the page since JavaScript will be used to show/hide the content.

.dynamic-content {
    display:none;
}

The JavaScript

This is the complicated part. First, we need to parse the URL and check for a specific parameter. For this example I will be using the parameter name “dc”, so in this case, my URL would look like this:

https://jennamolby.com/my-webpage?dc=mycontent

This is the piece of code to parse the URL. You can change “dc” to be whatever parameter name you want.

// Parse the URL parameter
function getParameterByName(name, url) {
    if (!url) url = window.location.href;
    name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, "\\$&");
    var regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + name + "(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)"),
        results = regex.exec(url);
    if (!results) return null;
    if (!results[2]) return '';
    return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, " "));
}
// Give the parameter a variable name
var dynamicContent = getParameterByName('dc');

Use jQuery to show/hide content

To make things easier, we’ll use jQuery to show/hide the content, in conjuction with the javascript. You can add in as many conditions as you want, just make sure you always include default content just in case parameters are misspelled or not in the URL.

The full javaScript code

Here’s the full piece of javascript and jQuery code.

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Questions?

Email me, send me a tweet @jennamolby, or leave a comment