Product page URLs: Arabic or English?

What is a slug?

It is the last part of a page address that describes its content, like “arabic-coffee” at the end of the link. A clean slug is a few lowercase words joined by hyphens, with no spaces or symbols.

Arabic or English slug?

A slug in Arabic letters is perfectly valid, and the browser shows it in Arabic in the address bar. But when it is copied and pasted in some places it shows up encoded, with every Arabic letter turned into six characters such as %D9%82. An English slug stays the same everywhere. Choose what suits your audience, then stick with it.

Arabic Coffee, 500 g & Cardamom! arabic-coffee-500-g-and-cardamom

How to do it

1. Open the URL slug generator and type the title.
2. Choose the mode: “Arabic” keeps Arabic letters, and “Latin” gives only a-z and digits.
3. Set the separator, the case and a maximum length.
4. Check the slug and its encoded form, edit it by hand if you like, then copy it.

About transliterating Arabic

There is no accurate way to write Arabic in Latin letters without the short vowels: «مكتب», «مكتبة» and «كتب» are written with almost the same letters. So the tool's transliteration table is rough and off by default, and it can turn two different words into the same result. If you want an English slug, it is better to write the English title yourself.

Before you publish

• The options that normalize alef and ta marbuta are off by default because they change spelling: «قهوة» becomes «قهوه».
• The tool does not check whether the slug is already in use.
• Changing a published URL needs a permanent 301 redirect, or you lose the visits coming to the old link.

Once you have picked the slug, see how the page might look in search results with the Search snippet preview, and add it to your sitemap with the XML sitemap generator.