Shankar Ganesh

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Post slug is a mostly underused option in WordPress.

By default, if you write a blog post with the title “This is the heading”, your post permalink may be something like this domain.com/date/this-is-the-heading (if you still have something like domain/?p=55, you could change this in Options >> Permalinks)

WordPress generates these post permalinks based on your post titles. These can be very easily modified by using the Post slug option located in the right panel on the ‘Write Post’ page.

What are the benefits on modifying post slugs?

• You can use post slugs to shorten very lengthy URLs for the benefit of your readers. For example, a post titled “This url is very lengthy that I cannot remember it” will have its permalink as this-url-is-very-lengthy- that-I-cannot-remember-it. You can shorten this to anything, say for example: url-lengthy-to-remember
• You can use post slugs to eliminate less significant words like a, the, it’s, its, etc.
• Post slugs can be used for SEO optimization. You might want to write a catchy title to attract your readers, but this may have less or no significance in terms of SEO, with no keywords.
  This is another place where Post slugs come in. You might have a post titled “Have you seen the new look Google search pages?”. But for better SEO, you could modify the post slug option to google-search-pages-redesigned-review. Now you have a balance between writing titles for your readers and search engines.

But, make sure that you don’t turn permalinks irrelevant to your post titles, and also take care not to overstuff them with keywords. Share your views in the comments.

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