URL Slugs That Last: Transliteration, Length, Changes and Redirects

• ▸Lowercase. Many servers treat paths as case sensitive, so mixed case creates duplicate URLs.
• ▸Hyphens between words. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators, while underscores can join words together.
• ▸ASCII letters and digits only, in most cases, for portability across email clients, chat apps and old tools.
• ▸Short and descriptive. A reader should understand the page from the slug. Sixty characters is a comfortable limit.
• ▸Stable. A slug should not depend on anything that will change, such as a category, an author or a year.

Transliteration converts letters to their closest plain equivalent. The common cases are accents removed (café becomes cafe), ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, ø becomes o and đ becomes d. German has two conventions: ä to a and ä to ae. Pick one and use it everywhere, since two spellings of the same title produce two URLs.

Unicode normalization matters too. An é can be one character or an e followed by a combining accent. Normalizing before you transliterate makes sure the same title always produces the same slug.

For titles in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian and other scripts you have three options, and each has trade-offs.

• ▸Keep the native characters. Modern browsers show them readably and search engines handle them, but they are percent encoded when copied into some tools, which makes long unreadable links.
• ▸Transliterate to Latin letters. Readable and portable, but the quality depends on the tool, and some languages have several romanization systems.
• ▸Use a short ID or a neutral English keyword and keep the native title in the page itself. Safest, but less descriptive.

Whichever you choose, apply it consistently across the site.

• ▸Dropping words such as a, the, and and of shortens the slug without losing meaning, but do not strip so much that two titles collapse to the same slug.
• ▸Do not put the year in the slug of a page you intend to update. A guide titled best-laptops-2026 looks stale in 2027, and changing it needs a redirect.
• ▸Avoid database IDs unless you need guaranteed uniqueness. If you do, put the readable part first and the ID last.

Two articles can have the same title, so the system needs a rule for collisions. The usual one is to append a counter, such as -2. Decide this before you launch so it does not become a manual task.

If your site serves tools or sections from the root, such as a page at /tools or /blog, an article with the slug tools collides with a route. Keep a reserved list of path names your application uses and reject or rename slugs that match.

• ▸Set a permanent redirect, status 301, from the old URL to the new one, and keep it for as long as the old link might exist in the wild.
• ▸Update the canonical tag, the internal links and the sitemap to the new address.
• ▸Do not chain redirects. Point every old URL directly to the final one.
• ▸Check the redirect with a crawler. Both old and new addresses should return what you expect.
• ▸Change slugs rarely. Each change is a risk, so do it only when the old one is wrong, misleading or invalid.

Do not hand write slugs. Build them from the title with one function that normalizes, transliterates, lowercases, removes filler words and trims length at a word boundary. The Slugify URL Generator on this site follows those steps and lets you test a batch of titles, which is useful when you are migrating an old site.