It's always better to use CakePHP's HTML helper to create relative links that will make your app portable. What if you need to create relative link that will use https:// instead of the default http://? This will be useful if most of your site uses http:// but some pages need to be secure (eg. registration or checkout page). Let's say your link is pointing to /pages/register, here's how to do it:echo $html->link("Register", str_replace('http://', 'https://', $html->url("/pages/register", true)));What happens here? we use $html->url() to create a relative URL, and set the 2nd parameter to true so it will return the full URL (eg. http://domain.com/pages/register) and then replace http:// with https://, we then pass that URL to HTML helper's link() method to create a HTML link.Note that you don't need to do this if the originating page is already using https://. If that is the case, then all relative links will also use https:// by default.