Marketing · Guide
Slug best practices for marketing assets
A slug is any short, machine-friendly identifier — the path segment in a URL, a filename for a creative asset, an export name for a campaign. Good slug habits prevent broken links, duplicate uploads, and CDN cache headaches.
Last reviewed: April 2026
Core rules
- Lowercase only. Mixed case breaks on case-sensitive servers.
- Use hyphens between words, never spaces or underscores in URLs (underscores are fine for filenames).
- Strip diacritics — café becomes cafe.
- Keep it under ~60 characters. Long slugs get truncated in search snippets.
- No trailing punctuation, no leading numbers if avoidable.
URL slugs
Match the page's primary keyword, not its full title. ‘How to write a great Google Ads headline’ becomes /google-ads-headline-tips, not /how-to-write-a-great-google-ads-headline-2026.
Avoid stop words (the, a, of, and) unless removing them changes meaning.
Don't include the date unless the content is genuinely time-bound.
Filename slugs for creative assets
Add structured tokens so files sort and search well: campaign_channel_format_variant_yyyymm.ext. For example: spring_meta_video_15s_2026_04.mp4.
Underscores are safer than hyphens in filenames, since some tools interpret hyphens specially. Pick one and stay consistent inside each context.
Generate clean slugs
Paste any text into the Slug & Filename Cleaner to get a lowercase, hyphenated, diacritic-free output suitable for URLs or filenames.