How to Write a Good URL Slug

The rules, in order of how much they cost to get wrong

1. Never change a live slug without a redirect — breaks every link that exists
2. Lowercase — because /About-Us and /about-us are different pages
3. Hyphens, never underscores — underscores read as word joiners
4. Shorter than the title — a slug is not a headline

Only the first one is expensive. The rest are cheap if you decide once and never revisit.

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What the conversion does

Lowercases everything, replaces every run of non-alphanumeric characters with a single hyphen, trims hyphens off both ends.

How to Write a Good URL Slug — A Complete Guide for 2026!

becomes

how-to-write-a-good-url-slug-a-complete-guide-for-2026

Deliberately mechanical, which means predictable — the same title always produces the same slug. That matters as soon as you're generating them at any volume.

Why lowercase isn't cosmetic

URL paths are case-sensitive on most servers. /About-Us and /about-us are genuinely different addresses.

If both resolve, you've duplicated every page on the site — which splits whatever ranking signals they earn. That's a real SEO problem, not an untidiness.

Choosing lowercase and never deviating removes the question permanently, which is worth more than any individual case decision.

Hyphens, without exception

Search engines have long treated a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner. So red_shoes can read as one token where red-shoes is unambiguously two words.

No upside to underscores, one clear downside.

The tool shows an underscored version purely so the difference is visible. It's a demonstration, not an option.

A slug is not a title

This is the rule people skip.

how-to-write-a-good-url-slug identifies the page and reads well in a link, a search result and a shared message.

how-to-write-a-good-url-slug-for-your-website-in-2026-complete-guide does that job no better, and looks worse everywhere it appears.

Dropping the small words — a, the, of, for, to, and — is the standard way to tighten one, and costs almost nothing in meaning. Under about 60 characters keeps it readable where it matters.

The shortened output is a blunt cut at 50 characters, not a clever one. It'll leave a trailing hyphen or half a word, on purpose — so you finish the edit deliberately rather than trusting a machine to guess where the meaning ends.

Accents fold. Non-Latin scripts vanish

Two different behaviours, and the difference matters a lot:

Latin accented characters are transliterated to their base letters — exactly what you want.

Characters outside the Latin alphabet are dropped entirely. The Japanese is gone without trace.

So a French or German title is fine. A Japanese, Greek, Arabic or Cyrillic one may lose its entire subject. If you aren't working in a Latin script, this is the one output you must read before using.

Leave the year out

A slug containing 2026 looks stale in 2027 even if you've updated the article thoroughly.

And fixing it means changing a published slug — which means the redirect problem below. The cost is paid every year; the benefit is small and lasts a few months.

Dates belong in the title and the page metadata, where they can be changed freely.

The expensive one

The slug IS the page's address.

Changing it breaks every existing link, every bookmark and every citation, and search engines treat the new URL as a new page starting from zero authority.

If you must change one, set up a permanent redirect from the old address — at the same moment you make the change, not afterwards.

And if a slug is merely imperfect rather than wrong, leaving it alone is usually the better decision. Perfect slugs on a site nobody can link to are worth nothing.

Print the style sheet — it exists mainly so a site's URLs stay consistent when more than one person is writing them.