Turn a product name into a clean address

The slug is the last part of your web address - the bit after your domain and folder. It is a small thing that shows up in a lot of places: in Google's results as a breadcrumb, in the link when someone shares your product, and in every message where a customer sends the address to a friend.

Short and readable beats long and complete. Someone should be able to look at the address and know roughly what the page sells. "merino-crew-socks" does that; "product-id-48192" does not, and neither does a slug carrying the entire product title with every filler word in it.

Use hyphens, never underscores or spaces. Google reads a hyphen as a word break and an underscore as a joiner, so merino_crew_socks reads as one long word to a search engine. Spaces are worse - they get encoded as %20 and turn a readable address into something nobody wants to share.

Keep accents and symbols out. A product called "Café Crème" should become cafe-creme. The letters transliterate rather than disappearing, because dropping them leaves "caf-crme" which means nothing. An ampersand becomes "and" for the same reason.

The most important rule is about changing an address that already exists. If a product page is live, ranking, and linked to from other sites, renaming its slug breaks all of it. Every link goes to a dead page and the ranking you built resets. If you must change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one - that carries most of the value across, though not all of it. Perfect slugs are worth writing for new products and rarely worth chasing on old ones.