Slug Generator

What makes a URL good

A URL is read by two audiences with surprisingly similar needs. A person deciding whether to click a search result glances at the URL to work out where it will take them, and a clean, human-readable slug is a small but real trust signal — a link ending in 'how-to-repot-a-fern' is obviously more clickable than one ending in '?p=48372'. Search engines use the slug as one modest signal about what the page covers. Both audiences reward the same qualities: lowercase, hyphen-separated, descriptive, and short enough to read at a glance. The words in a slug should be the words a person would actually use to describe the page, not a keyword-stuffed string that reads like a search query.

Never change a slug casually

This is the mistake that costs real traffic. Once a page is published and indexed, its URL is an address that other sites link to, that search engines have recorded, and that people have bookmarked. Editing the slug creates a new address and abandons the old one, so every one of those inbound links now points at a 404 and the accumulated search authority evaporates. If you genuinely must change a slug — because the original had a typo, or the article's subject changed — set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, which tells browsers and search engines that the page has moved permanently and passes the authority along. Get the slug right before publishing, and you never have to have this problem.