Can a slug use letters that are not English?

Yes. Google recommends words in your readers’ language, and addresses can carry any letters, percent-encoded. CMSKite writes accented and Hindi titles in plain Latin letters instead, which are easier to read and type in a link.

Does changing a slug hurt SEO?

Not much, if the old address redirects permanently to the new one: Google reads a permanent redirect as a strong sign that the new address is the one to show. Without a redirect, the old address answers “not found” and the links to it lead nowhere.

Glossary · SEO

Slug

A slug is the part of a web address that names one page in readable words: in bakery.example/blog/wedding-cake-guide, the slug is wedding-cake-guide. It is usually made from the page’s title, in lowercase letters, with hyphens between the words.

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An example

Titles on the left, the slugs CMSKite suggests for them on the right. Accents are dropped, punctuation becomes a hyphen, and Hindi is written in Latin letters the way Hindi speakers type it.

Title → slug · plain

How Much Does a Wedding Cake Cost in 2026?  →  how-much-does-a-wedding-cake-cost-in-2026
Bolo de casamento: quanto custa?            →  bolo-de-casamento-quanto-custa
Pastel de boda: ¿cuánto cuesta?             →  pastel-de-boda-cuanto-cuesta
शादी के केक की कीमत                          →  shaadi-ke-kek-ki-kimat

The first one is worth shortening by hand: wedding-cake-cost still says what the post is, and it stays true when you update the prices next year.

Why it matters for a small-business blog

The slug is in the address people see in search results and in every link pasted into WhatsApp or an email. Readable words tell them what they will get before they click. Google recommends words in your readers’ language rather than ID numbers, with hyphens between them.

It is also the one part of a post that is hard to change later. Every link to the post, from other sites, from your own posts and from search results, uses it. A new slug without a redirect from the old one breaks all of them.

Common mistakes

Numbers instead of words. /blog/?p=1482 says nothing; /blog/wedding-cake-cost says what the page is.
Underscores. Google recommends hyphens to separate words; underscores are what programmers use to join words into one.
Capital letters. Google treats /Wedding-Cake and /wedding-cake as two different addresses. Keep slugs in lowercase.
A year that will go stale. A post you will keep updating should not carry this year in its slug.
Renaming without a redirect. If you change a live post’s slug, the old address should send readers and search engines to the new one with a permanent redirect.

How CMSKite handles it

Made from the title while you leave it alone, and yours to edit in the post’s search settings before or after publishing.
In any language. Accented letters become plain ones (é → e), and Hindi in Devanagari is romanized (शादी → shaadi). A title with no letters that can be written in Latin, such as Japanese, gets a short code instead, so no two posts share an empty slug.
Unique in each blog. If a slug is taken, -2, -3 and so on are added.
Renaming is safe. A post remembers its last 20 slugs. On the free blog link an old address redirects permanently to the new one; with the embed, the post opens and names its new address as canonical; through the API, the response carries slugRedirectedFrom so your site can answer with a 301. See Making your posts findable.

Sources

Checked on 4 October 2026.

Questions

Can a slug use letters that are not English?: Yes. Google recommends words in your readers’ language, and addresses can carry any letters, percent-encoded. CMSKite writes accented and Hindi titles in plain Latin letters instead, which are easier to read and type in a link.
Does changing a slug hurt SEO?: Not much, if the old address redirects permanently to the new one: Google reads a permanent redirect as a strong sign that the new address is the one to show. Without a redirect, the old address answers “not found” and the links to it lead nowhere.

Checked 4 October 2026