What makes a slug good
- Readable out of context. Someone should be able to guess the page from a link pasted into a chat.
- Stable. Changing a slug breaks every existing link. If you must, redirect.
- Lowercase. Paths are case-sensitive on most servers, so mixed case invites a 404 from a typo.
- Hyphen-separated. Word boundaries a crawler can see.
Transliteration beats encoding
Cyrillic in a URL is legal, and browsers display it nicely in the address bar. The problem starts the moment it is copied: it becomes percent-encoded, and a five-word Russian title turns into a hundred-character string of escapes in every email, message and analytics report.
| Title | Encoded | Transliterated |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Как сделать SEO | %D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BA... | kak-sdelat-seo |
The second one survives being copied.
Truncation cuts at a word
Setting a maximum length trims at a separator rather than mid-word, so a slug never ends in half a syllable. If cutting at the boundary would leave almost nothing, the hard cut is kept instead — a stub is better than a single letter.
Questions
Why transliterate instead of percent-encoding?+
Because a percent-encoded Cyrillic URL is unreadable and unshareable — it becomes a wall of %D0%BF sequences the moment it is copied out of the address bar. Transliteration keeps the slug legible everywhere, in a link, an email and a printed page.
Which transliteration standard is this?+
The readable convention, not GOST or ISO 9. Those produce characters like ë and š, which are no more URL-safe than the Cyrillic was. Here щ becomes sch, ж becomes zh, and the soft sign disappears — which is what people actually type when searching.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?+
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so `two_words` may be read as one token. This is one of the few URL conventions with a clear technical reason behind it.
Should slugs be short?+
Short enough to read, long enough to be specific. Cutting a slug to three words to hit an arbitrary length loses meaning that helps both readers and crawlers. What genuinely helps is dropping stop words and boilerplate, which is what the option here does.