PublishedVerifiedEvery 6 weeksSources4 namedAuthored bySquareRank Team
SEO Panel · § 2.1.3 · How-to
URL slug on Squarespace
The URL slug on a Squarespace page is the visible path after your domain — /about, /services/web-design, /blog/coastal-palettes. The field lives at Page Settings > General > URL Slug, accepts lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens, and rejects spaces and most special characters automatically1. Changing a slug post-launch requires a URL Mappings 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one — otherwise inbound links return 404 and rankings drop.
This leaf walks through the slug rules, the change procedure, the URL Mappings redirect pattern, the special handling for blog and collection pages, and the four gotchas that catch first-time owners on Squarespace.
§01Definition
What a URL slug is, and why it matters
A URL slug is the visible, human-readable portion of a page's URL that lives after the domain — '/about' on yoursite.com/about, '/blog/coastal-palettes' on a blog post. Google's URL-structure guidance recommends descriptive, simple, hyphen-separated, lowercase URLs because they help users and search engines understand the page before clicking. The slug is one of the three SERP elements visible to users alongside the title and description, and it travels with every shared link, so it directly affects both click-through rate and link-sharing perception.
The honest scope: a clean slug does not by itself rank a page. A bad slug does cost click-through and creates 404s when it gets changed without a redirect. Google's documentation3 treats URL structure as a minor ranking signal compared to content and links — but a noticeable signal for SERP click-through and user trust.
§02Rules
Squarespace's slug rules and the SEO-aligned pattern
Squarespace accepts lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens in slugs. It rejects spaces, capital letters, and most special characters automatically — entering a space becomes a hyphen, an uppercase letter becomes lowercase. The platform also strips most punctuation. The SEO-aligned pattern: short (3-6 words), descriptive of the page's primary topic, hyphen-separated, no stop words like 'a', 'the', 'and' unless they materially aid readability, no dates.
Four rules to keep in mind:
Lowercase only. Squarespace enforces this automatically. /About becomes /about.
Hyphens, not underscores. Google explicitly recommends hyphens over underscores for word separation4. Squarespace defaults to hyphens.
No dates. A blog post slug like /2024/coastal-palettes ages badly — either you keep republishing or the URL screams "old". The slug should describe the topic, not the publish date.
No stop words unless they aid meaning./coastal-palettes-for-low-light-rooms reads better than /coastal-palettes-low-light-rooms but both are fine; /the-best-coastal-palettes wastes characters on a stop word that adds nothing.
§03Change
Changing a slug after a page is published
Open Page Settings > General. Edit the URL Slug field. Save. The page now lives at the new path — but the old path returns 404 unless you add a URL Mappings 301 redirect. Squarespace does not automatically generate redirects from old slugs to new ones (with one exception: a tiny set of system pages like /shop). For every slug change on a published page, the workflow is: change the slug, immediately go to Settings > Advanced > URL Mappings, add 'old-slug -> /new-slug 301', save.
The reason the redirect matters: inbound links to the old slug (from other sites, from social, from Google's index) return 404 if there's no redirect, and a 404 page loses both the user and the link equity. The 301 redirect tells Google the page moved permanently, and Google generally transfers most ranking signal from the old URL to the new one within a few weeks. Without the redirect, you start from zero on the new URL.
§04The pattern
The URL Mappings redirect pattern, in code
URL Mappings live at Settings > Advanced > URL Mappings. The syntax is line-by-line: source path on the left, arrow, destination path on the right, status code on the far right. 301 is permanent; 302 is temporary (rarely the right choice for slug changes). Wildcards work with an asterisk for bulk patterns. Multiple lines for multiple redirects.
textURL Mappings syntax for a slug change and a bulk pattern
# Simple slug change/about-us -> /about 301# Blog post slug change/blog/old-post-slug -> /blog/new-post-slug 301# Bulk pattern: move all old service URLs into the new services parent/old-services/[name] -> /services/[name] 301# Note: full URL Mappings syntax in the Redirects cluster (§ 2.3)
The full URL Mappings syntax, including wildcards and the gotchas around them, is documented in the URL Mappings Syntax leaf in the redirects cluster. For simple slug changes, the line-by-line pattern above is sufficient.
§05Blog and collection
Blog and collection page slugs are different
Blog posts and collection items (products, events, portfolio entries) have their own URL slug field, separate from regular page slugs. The slug field on a blog post lives at the post's Settings > URL Slug. The collection itself (the parent page, e.g. /blog/) has its own slug at Page Settings > General. The two are concatenated: a blog at /blog/ with a post slug 'coastal-palettes' renders at /blog/coastal-palettes.
Two patterns worth naming. First: changing the collection's own slug (e.g. /blog/ to /journal/) changes every post URL underneath it. That's a bulk URL change requiring bulk redirects. Second: removing a post from one collection and adding it to another changes its URL too. Both cases benefit from the bulk wildcard pattern in URL Mappings.
§06Gotchas
Four Squarespace-specific slug gotchas
First: the slug field has a maximum length, and Squarespace silently truncates very long slugs. Aim for under 60 characters. Second: changing a slug while logged in does not invalidate the live cache immediately — visitors sometimes hit the old URL for a few minutes. Third: Squarespace reserves certain path prefixes (/s/, /api/, /config/) for internal use; do not use them as slugs. Fourth: the homepage does not have a user-editable slug — it always lives at /, regardless of what you'd prefer.
A fifth, more subtle gotcha: some templates auto-generate slugs from the page name. If you create a page called "About Us" without manually setting the slug, Squarespace generates /about-us. Many owners then realise they prefer /about and change it — without adding the redirect. The same auto-generation runs for blog post titles, which is why many blogs have slug strings derived from the post title. Set the slug intentionally before publishing, and you save yourself the redirect dance later.
What a clean slug actually does
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SERP elements visible to users — title, description, slug. Slug shows on every result.
