You don’t need to pay attention to your post slugs — but there could be real traffic benefits if you do.
When we start writing a new post, WordPress automatically creates a URL for the post using our blog’s address, the date, and post title. Great, now you don’t have to worry about your post’s URL, right? All taken care of.
Not quite. You don’t need to lose sleep over your post URLs, but paying some attention to the post slug — the bit of the URL after the address and date — can have a nice traffic payoff.
“I’m still not sure what a slug is!”
The slug is the bit of your post’s (or page’s) URL that describes what that specific post is about. Here’s the URL of this post, with the slug in bold:
https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2014/08/15/post-slugs/
If I’d used the URL that WordPress auto-generated for me based on the post title, the slug would have been:
https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2014/08/15/all-about-slugs-not-the-slimy-kind/
They both get the job done, but one is short and easy to read, while the other is long and unwieldy. Think about what the auto-generated slug would look like for “Perennial Favorites: Should You Connect Your Blog to Your LinkedIn Account?” or “Recommended Reading: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” and you’ll start to see how easy it is for post slugs to bulk up.
“I’m still not sure why I should care.”
First, it makes an easy-to-remember, easy-to-share URL, and lets the person with whom you’re sharing the URL — or the person who sees the link out in the wild — understand the focus of your post quickly. And when we know what we’re getting into, we’re more likely to click.
More importantly, Google likes a short, focused slug that contains the key words describing the post and not a lot of fluff. Slugs are important to search engine rankings; the fewer keywords your slugs contain, the more highly they’re valued. Google is smart — it knows that a long title and slug have lots of filler words (from a search engine standpoint), so it gives the words less weight.
Let’s look again at what the auto-generated slug for this post would look like:
https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2014/08/15/all-about-slugs-not-the-slimy-kind/
It’s full of words that make for an interesting title but are meaningless from a search perspective: all, about, not, the, slimy, and kind. If you were looking for information on post slugs, you wouldn’t search for those terms and the Google Wizards know it. Make your titles as fun, funny, titillating, or descriptive as you want — then edit your slugs to make them succinct and focused.
“I’m convinced. How do I edit my slugs?”
Simple. If you’re writing a post (or page) in the classic editor, the URL appears just below the title field — click “Edit” to change the post slug:
If you’re writing in the new visual editor, you’ll find the post slug under “Advanced Settings,” the last option on the right-hand side of the page. “Slug” is the first field — enter your text, and it will save along with your post text.
The slug will depend on what you’re writing about, but here are a few ground rules:
- Keep it short — five words or less — and limit it to words that actually describe what the post is about.
- Remove “stopwords.” Words like the, in, a/an, is, and it don’t tell search engines anything about the focus of your post, so they’ll be filtered out. You want to keep your slug focused, so don’t waste a word on something that search engines will ignore anyway.
- No punctuation. Slugs are lowercase letters and numbers only. Punctuation will be automatically removed, which could leave you with meaningless words (“doesnt”).
It only takes a second to edit your slug, but Google will thank you!
Note: Changing the slug of a post that you’ve already published means that all existing links to that post will stop working. Make sure you update all links with the new URL if you decide to retroactively modify your slugs.
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I appreciate the advice very much. My question is whether it is possible to edit the slugs in older posts or will this mess up the links?
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You can edit them, but yes, you’d also have to change any links to those posts; the old links will stop working.
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Thanks so much Michelle for the information.
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This is so helpful, Michelle. Thanks so much. Hope you keep composing these little lessons. Judy
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Very good and useful information. My recentmost post had a title of “Who’s Next?” and just now I found that the slug is “whos-next” (the full url is http://idlesunday.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/whos-next/ ) .. had never paid any attention to it earlier.
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Great tips! Sometimes the full title just gets too long and sloppy.
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Very helpful advice
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good reminder about the importance of search engines as well as human readers
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A valuable tip indeed. (Right now, my post editor generates numbers, so I have had to edit it using the FULL TITLE of my posts to get rid of the meaningless numbers like 403 and 159. With this tip, I now know I don’t have to write the full title with hyphens and that it’s even better to have shorter slugs!) Thanks, Michelle!
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This is not something I have ever considered before. Thanks!
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My blog is very new, I appreciate any advice I can get, thank you.
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Thanks for the tip!
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Thank you! Very informative! 👌
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Thanks for sharing the info – a very useful tip đŸ™‚
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I agree people are much more likely to click links that are transparent with the title or keywords in the URL. Thanks for the tips.
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Great post — thanks for the advice. Looks like I got some work to do!
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Useful advice. I never even thought about editing the slugs before.
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Wow… I never knew what a slug (not the slimy kind) was until now. Thanks for the tip.
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It’s the little things, really. I never knew slugs were that important!
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Such a helpful post. Thank you!
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Thanks for the tip – good to know.
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This might be the best blogging advice I’ve ever received. I’ve been editing my slugs all night ☺️
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Thanks for the post – I was never sure what the point of changing it was but now I’m converted!
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Why can’t I change the slug?
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What’s giving you trouble?
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Good information, thank you. Question: Can I have the same slug for more than one post, or does each one need to be unique?
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Unique. If you try to use slugs that you’ve already used, WordPress will add a number — /slug-1/, /slug-2/, etc.
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Thank you
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Can I ask is five words in the slug a magic number or…?
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You can certainly use more than five, but we like that as a rule of thumb. Too many more, and it diminishes the “value” of those words, which is what you’re trying to avoid by focusing your slugs in the first place.
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I have learnt something new today. Thanks Michelle.
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Thanks. I just went back and fixed/shortened all my slugs. Easy to do in Quick Edit feature.
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It’s a very helpful post. Good advice, now I’ll keep in mind. Thanks Michelle.
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My daughter is working at a digital marketing firm and she told me this last week. I didn’t know how to change the url. Thanks for this! It will make a big difference.
Can I edit old posts?
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You can, but changing the slug it will break any links using the current URL.
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Interesting. Thanks for the info!
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Btw, how to change the required slug in wp android app? There is no slug option in the first place in the app.
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I believe it’s something you need to do when logged in on a computer, not in the app, but let me check on that.
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Thanks for the advice. Found it useful and put it to use straight away!
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