The present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for efficiently handling navigational state by encoding the navigational state into each URL of a page. The navigational state is encoded in such a way that it can be easily decoded from the URL in order to restore the addressed view of the Portal and that allows for further navigation start from that view. Each user interaction uses an URL in a Portal page containing the navigational state consisting of a part that is identical across all URLs on that page and an additional part which represents the semantic of each specific URL. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention the internal representation of navigational state is laid down in a hierarchical tree-like structure for serialization purposes. The hierarchical tree-like structure is based on a well-defined state model that is optimized in terms of state serialization. The state model arranges the contained navigational state information in character based information. That saves processing time as it avoids type conversion of navigational information. A further embodiment of the present invention includes further strategies to reduce the amount of information that must be serialized.