URL Slug Length Best Practices

The pattern is clear: the official documents care about readability and consistency. Any precise "ideal length" you read elsewhere, including our own 60-character target, is a practical guideline rather than a ranking rule.

The 60-character figure is an industry habit, not a published requirement. It survives because it is a useful budget:

1. It leaves room for the rest of the URL. The slug is only the last part of the address. https://example.com/blog/ already uses 25 characters before the slug starts.
2. It fits a phrase, not a sentence. Sixty characters hold roughly eight to ten ordinary words, which is enough for a primary keyword and one qualifier.
3. It is easy to check. A single number turns "keep it short" into something an editor or a script can verify.

That is why our length indicator uses 60 and 75 characters as its warning points. If your slug is 64 characters and every word earns its place, that is fine. If it is 99 characters, something can almost always go.

Google does not say that a shorter URL ranks higher, so be wary of anyone who promises a ranking boost from trimming a few characters. The real benefits are practical:

• Readability. People decide whether to click partly from the URL they see. best-running-shoes-beginners is understood at a glance.
• Sharing. Short URLs survive email clients, chat apps and printed material without wrapping or looking broken.
• Maintenance. A slug that names the topic, not the headline, does not need to change when you rewrite the title or update the year.
• Clean reporting. Analytics and Search Console reports list URLs. Short, descriptive paths make those tables readable.

Work through these steps in order and stop as soon as the slug is short and still clear:

1. Start from the title. Generate the full slug first so you can see every word.
2. Remove stop words such as "the", "to", "for" and "in", unless they carry meaning (see the next section).
3. Drop years and numbers that will go out of date, but keep numbers that identify the thing itself.
4. Cut at a word boundary if the slug is still too long. Never cut in the middle of a word.
5. Keep the primary keyword near the front, so it survives any later trimming and is visible first.
6. Check for duplicates. Shorter slugs collide more often. The bulk CSV tool can add -2, -3 when two titles produce the same slug.

Here is one long title run through those steps. Each row is real output from the slug engine with the setting shown:

The last two rows show why the order matters. Limiting the word count before removing stop words keeps the filler and throws away the topic: the-ultimate-guide-to-the says nothing about coffee. Remove the filler first, then apply a limit only if you still need one.

A second example, for a title that is long without being padded:

The automatic cut keeps the slug valid, but a human editor would do better: a slug like long-article-titles says more in 19 characters. Automatic limits are a safety net, not a substitute for choosing the words.

Removing stop words is the fastest way to shorten a slug, and usually safe. Our default list contains a, an, the, and, or, but, in, on, at, to, for, with, by and from. These outputs show where it helps and where it hurts:

When a stop word is part of a name or changes the meaning, keep it, or edit that one slug by hand after bulk generation.

Many CMS plugins and quick scripts limit length with a plain substring. That cuts words in half. With the 69-character coffee slug above:

A half word such as -sh looks like a typo and can even form a different word. If you limit length in your own code, cut at the last separator instead. These functions mirror the "Max characters" option for a string that is already a slug:

function truncateSlug(slug, max = 60, sep = '-') {
  if (slug.length <= max) return slug;
  const cut = slug.slice(0, max + 1);
  const i = cut.lastIndexOf(sep);
  return i > 0 ? cut.slice(0, i) : slug.slice(0, max);
}

truncateSlug('the-ultimate-guide-to-the-best-coffee-shops-in-new-york-city-for-2026', 40);
// 'the-ultimate-guide-to-the-best-coffee'

def truncate_slug(slug: str, max_len: int = 60, sep: str = "-") -> str:
    if len(slug) <= max_len:
        return slug
    cut = slug[: max_len + 1]
    i = cut.rfind(sep)
    return cut[:i] if i > 0 else slug[:max_len]

truncate_slug("how-to-write-a-product-description-that-actually-sells", 30)
# 'how-to-write-a-product'

Taking max + 1 characters first matters: if the character right after the limit is a separator, the last word fits exactly and is kept.

[ ] Slug describes the page topic in 3-5 meaningful words
[ ] 60 characters or fewer (75 at most) unless every word is needed
[ ] Stop words removed, except in names and where they change the meaning
[ ] No dates or years in evergreen content; model numbers kept
[ ] Cut at a word boundary, never mid-word
[ ] Primary keyword near the front
[ ] Lowercase, hyphen-separated, no trailing hyphen
[ ] Unique within its folder (no accidental -2 duplicates)
[ ] Whole path is short too, not just the slug
[ ] Published URL changed? 301 redirect from the old address

The URL slug generator has a live length indicator plus "Max words" and "Max characters" options that cut at word boundaries, and an editable stop word list. For a spreadsheet of titles, the bulk CSV slug generator applies the same limits to every row and can make duplicate slugs unique. If you shorten slugs that are already published, follow our guide to changing URLs in bulk with 301 redirects. For the other slug rules, such as hyphens, lowercase and accents, read what is a URL slug. If a link is full of percent-escapes, decode it with the URL encoder/decoder to see how long the slug really is.

• Google Search Central: URL structure best practices for Google Search
• Google Search Central: Site moves with URL changes
• IETF: RFC 9110, HTTP Semantics, section 4.1
• Sitemaps XML format (sitemaps.org)