A slug is the human-readable part of a URL after the domain. Good ones are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated and describe the page in words someone would actually use. The most consequential rule has nothing to do with wording: once a slug is published, changing it breaks every link to it unless you add a redirect.
What to keep and what to drop
Three to five meaningful words is usually enough. Drop filler like "a" and "the" unless removing them changes the sense. Drop dates unless the content is genuinely time-bound, because a 2024 in the URL makes an evergreen page look stale forever. Keep the words a person would type, not the words your CMS generated from the title.
Hyphens, not underscores
Hyphens are treated as word separators in URLs; underscores are less reliably split, which can mean a multi-word slug is read as one token. This is one of the few URL conventions with a clear and consistent recommendation behind it.
Accents and non-Latin characters
Accented and non-Latin characters are legal in URLs but are percent-encoded when transmitted, turning a readable slug into a string of percent signs when copied. Transliterating to base Latin letters keeps it readable. Our slug tool strips accents to their base letters — café becomes cafe rather than losing the é.
Changing a published slug
The old URL stops working the moment you change it. Every existing link, bookmark and search result points at a page that no longer exists, and whatever authority that URL accumulated is lost unless a 301 redirect carries it forward. Change an established slug only when there is a real reason, and always add the redirect.
Slugs are not a ranking lever
A descriptive slug helps a person decide whether to click and helps anyone reading the raw link understand where it goes. It is a small, sensible signal — not something worth stuffing keywords into. A slug that reads like a keyword list looks like spam to a human, which is the audience that matters at the moment of the click.
Related tools and guides
Last updated September 2026 · Editorial policy · How we verify Unicode claims