URL Slug
This module allows you to set a custom, stable URL slug for your content independently of its title. This prevents SEO issues and broken links when page titles are changed, ensuring long-term URL stability and clean site architecture. It integrates with Pathauto and can be configured per content type.
URL Slug decouples your page titles from their URL paths, providing a powerful, automated solution for long-term SEO stability and clean site architecture. By isolating the slug, it prevents cascading URL breaks across multi-level site structures and nested paths.
According to SEO standards, a URL slug is the unique, user-friendly text that appears at the end of a web address, and it is a critical on-page ranking factor. While using the node title as a slug works well for blog posts, it creates massive SEO problems for transactional or hierarchical landing pages:
- The Title-Change problem: Marketing teams frequently tweak page titles to improve conversion or update messaging. If your URL is tied to the title, the URL changes too—forcing you to rely on 301 redirects, which is not optimal for SEO and bleeds PageRank.
- The Hierarchy problem: In multi-level sites (parent/child relationships), if a parent page title changes, the URLs of all its children change automatically. Manually forcing paths is not scalable and leads to broken links and severe SEO inconsistencies over time.
The URL Slug module solution: This module adds a specific field for defining the permanent, stable segment of a page’s URL—regardless of its title—and a token for easy use with Pathauto. This allows you to change titles as often as you like without altering the URL structure, which remains consistent, or the automated hierarchies of the navigation path and main pages.
Key Features
- SEO Stability: Change your page titles anytime without breaking your URL paths or generating endless 301 redirects.
- Zero-Config Title Fallback: The
[node:url_slug]token returns the custom slug if filled; otherwise, it seamlessly falls back to the node title. Fully translation-aware. - Hierarchy-Safe: Integrates perfectly with Pathauto menu/parent patterns.
- Per Content Type: Easily enable the slug field only on the specific content types that need it from a single settings form.
How It Works
- Enable the module and visit Configuration › Search and metadata › URL Slug (
/admin/config/search/url-slug). - Select the content types that require independent URL slugs.
- Update your Pathauto patterns to use the
[node:url_slug]token instead of the title token (e.g.,/[node:menu-link:parent:url:path]/[node:url_slug]).