Slug

Every page on your website has its own address, and the slug is the last, readable part of it. In an address such as yourbusiness-example.com/services/roof-renovation, "roof-renovation" is the slug. It looks like a detail, but those few words tell visitors, search engines and AI systems at a glance what the page is about, even before anyone clicks the link.

Most content management systems, such as WordPress, Shopify or Webflow, automatically create a slug based on the page title. That's handy, but it often produces long or messy addresses with articles, dates or numbers that add nothing. Making a deliberate choice pays off, especially since you'd rather not change a slug later on.

What makes a good slug?

A good slug is short, descriptive and consistent. Google itself says that simple, readable URLs are preferable to long strings of parameters or ID numbers. The direct effect on your ranking is probably small, but a clear slug does help people recognise your page in the search results and makes links easier to share.

• Use lower case and hyphens between words, not spaces or underscores.
• Leave out unnecessary words such as "the", "a", "and" or "of".
• Include the main keyword in a natural way.
• Avoid dates and years, unless the page is genuinely tied to a specific period.
• Don't use accents or special characters: "cafe" is technically more reliable than "café".

A practical example

Take an accountancy firm in Manchester that creates a page titled "Our services for sole traders and small limited companies in the Greater Manchester area". The system automatically turns that into /our-services-for-sole-traders-and-small-limited-companies-in-the-greater-manchester-area. Much better is /services/accounting-sole-traders. It's shorter, clearer and fits into a logical URL structure in which all services sit in the same folder.

Changing a slug: be careful

If you change the slug of an existing page, the address changes. External sites, bookmarks and search engines still point to the old URL. Without a 301 redirect, visitors land on an error page and you lose the value built up by links. So only change slugs when there is a clear reason, for example during a restructure, and always set up a redirect. Don't forget to update your internal links and your sitemap as well.

A common mistake on multilingual sites is giving the French version the same English slug. A French-speaking visitor who sees /fr/roof-renovation is more likely to leave than one who sees /fr/renovation-toiture. So translate the slug along with the content, so every language version stays recognisable to the people reading it.

Slugs and AI search engines

When ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews mention a source, they often show the link or the domain with it. A descriptive slug makes that reference more trustworthy and more appealing to click. Language models also use every signal they can find to understand what a page is about. A slug such as /gutter-replacement-cost confirms the topic, whereas /page?id=4821 tells them nothing. It's not a magic bullet, but it is one piece of a coherent whole.

Not sure whether the addresses on your site are logically and consistently structured? A technical SEO analysis of your website quickly tracks down long, duplicate or faulty slugs, along with missing redirects.