What Is Post Slug?

If you’ve ever created a blog post in WordPress, you may have noticed a field labeled “post slug.” This seemingly small detail plays a significant role in optimizing your website’s URLs for search engines.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at 🔎 what post slugs are, why they’re important for SEO, and how to set them up in WordPress.

Understanding what post slugs are

If you have a URL like: http://example.com/sample-post/, the post slug is the sample-post part of that URL.

The importance of optimizing post slugs for SEO

Optimizing post slugs helps improve your website’s search engine rankings, making it easier for users to find your content. A well-crafted post slug should be concise, descriptive, and relevant to the content of the post. It should also include target keywords – but not at the expense of readability.

👉 Here’s what a good post slug does to your content:

• It improves user experience. A well-crafted post slug can make it easier for visitors to understand the contents of your page just by glancing at the URL. This will help site users decide whether to click your link, which ultimately improves your website’s traffic and engagement.
• It shortens URLs. It’s difficult to remember long and complex URLs, and it makes it even harder for users to share your content. You can create shorter, more noteworthy URLs that are easier to share on social media and other platforms by setting up a concise post slug.
• It boosts online brand presence. Post slugs can effectively reinforce your brand for search engine users to identify your content across all different platforms. Create a stronger online presence with consistent post slug formatting by using your brand name alongside relevant keywords.

How to set up post slugs

Setting up a post slug in WordPress is a piece of cake. Here’s how to set the slug for an individual post in WordPress:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Create a new post or edit an existing one in the WordPress editor.
3. Look for the URL field, which is located in the post settings sidebar. By default, WordPress will create a post slug based on the post title.
4. Click on the URL being displayed to customize it.
5. Edit your post slug in the Permalink field and click Enter to save it.
6. Preview the post to make sure the new post slug appears in the URL.

The default post slug format in WordPress

WordPress uses the post title as the post slug by default.

The default format for a post slug in WordPress looks like this: http://example.com/sample-post/

• sample-post is the slug,
• example.com is the website’s domain name.

When you should change a post slug

While WordPress automatically generates post slugs from your post titles, there are several situations where you’ll want to customize them.

SEO and Keyword Optimization If your post title doesn’t include your target keywords, updating the slug can improve your search rankings. For example, if you wrote a post titled “My Experience at Local Coffee Places” but want to target “best coffee shops Seattle,” you’d change the slug from my-experience-at-local-coffee-places to best-coffee-shops-seattle.

Cleaning Up Auto-Generated Slugs WordPress creates slugs from your exact post title, which can result in messy URLs. A post titled “10 Amazing Things You Never Knew About WordPress (Updated for 2024)” would automatically become 10-amazing-things-you-never-knew-about-wordpress-updated-for-2024. You could shorten this to simply wordpress-tips-2024.

Fixing Typos and Errors If you published a post with a typo in the title, the slug carries that error forward. A post titled “Beginer’s Guide to Blogging” creates the slug beginer-guide-to-blogging, which you’d want to correct to beginner-guide-to-blogging.

Creating Brandable URLs Long, descriptive titles don’t always make the best URLs. A post called “Everything Small Business Owners Need to Know About Social Media Marketing” could be simplified to small-business-social-media for easier sharing and memorability.

Important Note: If you change a post slug after publication, the old URL will break unless you set up a redirect. This can hurt your SEO and frustrate visitors who bookmarked or shared the original link.

Conclusion on what is post slug 🐛

So, what is post slug? In short, post slugs are a part of your URL that you can edit to be more search-engine-friendly and user-friendly. Customize your preferred post slug to increase traffic on your website today! 🚀