Example
10 Best Cafés in Montréal & Québec City (2026 Guide)
10-best-cafes-in-montreal-and-quebec-city-2026-guide
What makes a good slug
Keep slugs short and descriptive, and separate words with hyphens rather than underscores, which is what Google’s URL guidelines recommend. Leave out dates if you plan to update the page later.
Accents and symbols
Accented letters become plain ones (café becomes cafe), an ampersand becomes “and”, and apostrophes are dropped, so “what’s new” becomes “whats-new”. Each line becomes its own slug.
Slug examples
“How to Change Case in Excel (Step by Step)” becomes how-to-change-case-in-excel-step-by-step. You might trim it further to change-case-excel: shorter slugs are easier to share and read, and they still describe the page. Keep the words that someone would search for, and drop filler words only if the slug still makes sense.
Changing a slug later
Once a page is published and linked, changing its slug breaks those links. If you must change it, set up a permanent (301) redirect from the old URL to the new one so visitors and search engines follow along. That’s why it pays to leave years, numbers in lists, and “new” out of slugs you expect to update.