URL Slug Generator

Create cleaner Shopify URL slugs

The Shopify URL Slug Generator turns page titles into short, readable, SEO-friendly URL handles for products, collections, pages, and blog posts.

Why URL structure matters

Clean URLs are easier for users to scan, easier for teams to manage, and easier to preserve during migrations. When changing a live URL, always create a 301 redirect.

Related guide: Shopify SEO technical fixes.

What Shopify does to a URL handle automatically

Shopify generates a handle from the title when you create a product, collection, page or article, and it applies fixed rules before the URL is saved. Knowing them tells you what you actually need to fix and what the platform already handles.

The platform will not shorten a long handle, remove stop words, or replace an internal product code with a description. Those are the decisions this tool exists to make.

The URL prefixes you cannot change

Shopify enforces a path prefix for every resource type. You control the handle, never the segment in front of it.

• Products: /products/handle
• Collections: /collections/handle
• Pages: /pages/handle
• Blog articles: /blogs/blog-handle/article-handle

A product is also reachable at /collections/collection-handle/products/product-handle. That path exists by design, but the canonical tag should point at the flat /products/handle version — otherwise the same product is indexable at as many URLs as it has collections. Themes do not always emit that canonical correctly, which is one of the most common Shopify duplication problems.

Changing a handle after the page is live

When you edit a handle from inside the Shopify admin, Shopify offers to create a URL redirect from the old handle to the new one, and that option is enabled by default. Leave it enabled. Removing it turns every existing link, bookmark and search result pointing at the old URL into a 404.

That said, a redirect still costs something. Signals pass through a 301 but the page restarts part of its history, so the bar for changing a handle on a page that already ranks is high: the new URL has to be materially clearer, not merely tidier.

The practical rule we apply: fix handles freely before launch, fix them on live pages only when the current handle is genuinely unreadable — an internal SKU, a truncated word, a duplicated term — and never as a batch operation across a catalogue that is already earning traffic.

What makes a slug worth the characters

A URL is a small ranking signal and a larger trust signal. It appears in the result, it is what people paste into messages, and it is what a person reads to decide whether a link goes where they expect.

• Three to five descriptive words. Long enough to name the thing, short enough to read at a glance.
• Lowercase, hyphen-separated. Underscores and mixed case both cause avoidable duplication.
• Drop stop words such as the, a, of, and — they add length without adding meaning.
• Keep meaningful numbers, drop meaningless ones. A model year or a size belongs; an internal database id does not.
• Do not repeat the prefix. /collections/collections-summer and /products/product-wallet waste the clearest part of the URL.
• Transliterate rather than encode. Non-ASCII characters become percent-encoded escape sequences that are unreadable in a search result and fragile when shared.

Frequently asked questions

Should I change old Shopify URLs?

Only change old URLs when the new URL is meaningfully clearer and you can add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

How many words should a URL slug use?

A clear URL slug often uses three to five descriptive words. It should be readable, lowercase, hyphen-separated, and free of unnecessary parameters.