Vanity URL
A short link built to be read and typed by people: a branded domain plus a deliberately chosen, memorable slug.
Updated August 14, 2026
A vanity URL is a short link in which both halves are chosen for humans rather than for machines: a domain the audience recognises and a slug they can remember, as in brand.com/careers or go.brand.com/webinar. Technically it is an ordinary short link; what makes it a vanity URL is that the address itself is meant to be read aloud, printed on packaging, shown on a slide or typed from memory.
Design it for the worst channel it will appear in. Keep it short, use one word or a hyphenated pair, and avoid characters that are ambiguous in print or in speech — the digit one against a lowercase L, zero against a capital O. Decide the capitalisation you will publish and stay with it, since the path of an address is not guaranteed to be case-insensitive.
The common mistake is spending a good slug on a one-off campaign. Slugs are a limited namespace on each branded domain, so keep the obvious words — demo, app, pricing — for destinations you expect to keep, and give campaigns dated or suffixed slugs instead.