URL Slug Optimizer

What a good slug looks like

Lowercase, words separated by hyphens, no stop words unless they carry meaning, and short enough to read in a search result. /blog/how-to-fix-cors-errors beats /blog/2019/03/post-4471?id=8823 on every dimension that matters: it survives being copied into an email, it tells a user what they will get before clicking, and the words in it appear in search results.

Hyphens, not underscores

Google treats hyphens as word separators and has historically treated underscores as joiners, so cors_errors could be read as one token. The advice has softened over the years but the convention is universal, and there is no upside to the alternative. Spaces become %20 and make URLs unreadable wherever they are displayed.

Shorter is better, up to a point

Long URLs get truncated in search results, are harder to share, and correlate with lower click-through. But stripping so much that the slug stops describing the page is worse than a few extra words. Removing dates, category prefixes and stop words usually gets a slug to a sensible length without losing meaning — and removing the date has a second benefit, since a URL containing 2019 signals staleness even when the content is current.

Non-Latin characters and transliteration

URLs may contain Unicode, encoded as percent sequences, and modern browsers display them readably. They break in older systems, in plain-text email, and anywhere a URL is logged or copied. Transliterating to ASCII is the safer default for a general audience, though a site serving one language region may reasonably prefer native script that its own readers recognise.

Changing a slug costs the page's history

Every link, bookmark and accumulated ranking signal points at the old URL. Changing it without a 301 redirect discards all of it and produces a 404 for anyone following an existing link. With a redirect, most signal passes through, though chained redirects compound latency and lose a little at each hop. The practical conclusion: get the slug right at publication, and change it only for a real reason.

Uniqueness and collisions

Two articles titled the same way generate the same slug. Appending an incrementing suffix is standard; appending a random string produces URLs nobody can read. Trailing punctuation, repeated hyphens and leading or trailing separators should all be collapsed, since they generate near-duplicate URLs that resolve to the same page and split signals between them.