How to choose short link slugs that survive contact with humans

A slug has four jobs

It has to be typable when someone reads it off a poster, unambiguous when someone reads it aloud, memorable enough to survive the walk from the poster to a phone, and meaningful enough that your own team can find it in a list six months later. Random characters fail three of those four.

Character sets that cause typos

The classic collisions are 0 and O, 1 and l and I, and 5 and S in some typefaces. If you generate random slugs, use an alphabet that excludes those pairs. If you write slugs by hand, stick to lowercase letters and hyphens and avoid digits entirely unless the digit is meaningful, like a year.

Avoid mixed case in anything that will be typed. Most redirect servers treat paths as case-sensitive, so /SpringSale and /springsale are different links, and the person squinting at a poster will not know which one they saw.

Length versus meaning

For a link that is only clicked, length barely matters; nobody types a link in an email. For a link that is spoken on a podcast or printed on a van, every character costs. The useful rule is that spoken and printed links should be one short word, ideally something the listener could guess: brand.co/menu, brand.co/demo, brand.co/careers.

Reserve short generic words carefully. Once /demo is taken by one campaign, you cannot reuse it without breaking the old one, so decide early which words are permanent destinations and which are campaign-specific.

A naming convention for campaign slugs

Links that only your team reads benefit from structure: channel-campaign-variant, so em-spring26-a, ig-spring26-story. This makes the list searchable and makes it obvious what a link is for without opening it. Keep the segments in the same order every time; a convention that varies is not a convention.

Words to avoid

Anything that reads badly when concatenated. Slugs are read without word boundaries by tired people, and there is a long tradition of accidental unfortunate readings. Read every slug aloud once before it goes to print. Also avoid words that look like a phishing lure — /verify, /account-update, /secure-login — because you are training your audience to click exactly the kind of URL you want them to distrust.

Permanent slugs for permanent things

Some destinations outlive campaigns: your app store listing, your careers page, your support portal. Give those stable slugs, document them, and never repurpose them. When the underlying URL changes, edit the destination rather than minting a new link, so that every business card and PDF printed in the last three years keeps working.

Plan for collisions before they happen

Two people will eventually try to claim the same slug. Decide whether the platform should reject the second attempt outright, suggest a variant, or scope slugs per domain so that go.brand.com/sale and shop.brand.com/sale can coexist. Per-domain scoping is usually the right answer for organisations with several brands.