A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page or post in plain, readable words, such as “wordpress-critical-error” in cityofoaksmarketing.com/insights/wordpress-critical-error/. WordPress generates a slug automatically from the title, converting it to lowercase, replacing spaces with hyphens, and stripping punctuation. Slugs matter for SEO because they appear in search results, are read by both people and search engines as a signal of what the page covers, and become permanent references once a page is linked or shared. Good slugs are short, descriptive, and keyword-bearing without stuffing; changing a slug after publication requires a 301 redirect from the old URL so links and rankings are not lost.
Slug clean-up and redirect mapping are part of our technical SEO services, and we set clean permalink structures on every custom WordPress build.
