Emoji in WordPress URLs: How to Fix Them Safely

Did you put an emoji at the start of your post titles, and now your URLs look like a string of percent signs? Or did your WordPress theme or a bulk edit leave emoji in your permalinks? Then you are probably wondering whether it matters, and whether fixing it can break anything.

In this post we will show what an emoji does to a URL, how we cleaned it up on a real 575-post recipe site, and the safe order to do it in. So, let’s start.

What does an emoji in a URL actually look like?

A browser shows the emoji, but the address that travels over the internet is encoded. The fish emoji at the start of one of our recipe posts, for example, becomes %F0%9F%90%9F, so the address reads /%F0%9F%90%9F-garlic-butter-pan-fried-fish-fillets/. Anyone who copies that link into a message gets the long, unreadable version.

Google’s own advice on URLs is to use descriptive words people can read, and to percent-encode non-ASCII characters in links (Google Search Central, URL structure). Emoji are non-ASCII characters, so they fall into that group. Google does not say emoji in URLs are penalised. It simply says readable words are better.

Should you fix emoji in your WordPress URLs?

Our opinion: yes, if the post is meant to rank or be shared, and only if you do it with a permanent redirect. The reasons are practical. Clean URLs are easier to read, paste and trust. And when we looked at Search Console for therecipeworld.com, the page getting the most impressions was still being counted under its emoji address, which made reports harder to read.

The risk is not the new URL. The risk is leaving the old one without a redirect, so everyone who has the old link lands on a 404.

What did we see on our own site?

• therecipeworld.com has 575 published posts. Some of the older ones had an emoji at the start of the slug.
• We changed them to clean slugs and checked four of the old addresses from the command line: each one returned a 301 redirect to the clean address, and the clean address returned 200.
• Search Console’s Page indexing report still listed several of the old emoji addresses as “Crawled, currently not indexed” when we looked, even though they redirect. The report lags behind the real site, so we are not treating that as a fault.
• Over the last 90 days the visible posts sat mostly around positions 55 to 80, so the emoji clean-up is housekeeping. It is not the reason those posts rank low.

How to fix emoji in WordPress URLs safely

1. Find them. Open the Posts list and look for posts whose permalink starts with an odd character, or check the Search Console Pages report and your sitemap for addresses containing %F0%9F.
2. Pick the clean slug. Keep the words, drop the emoji: garlic-butter-pan-fried-fish-fillets. Do not change the words unless you have a reason, because every extra change is another thing that can go wrong.
3. Change the slug in the post settings. WordPress remembers the previous slug of a post and redirects it, but never assume. Check the result in step 4.
4. Test the redirect. From a terminal run curl -I on the old address. You want 301 and a Location header pointing at the new address. Then run it on the new address and expect 200. Google recommends server-side 301 or 308 redirects for permanent moves (Google Search Central, redirects).
5. Update your internal links. Menus, related-post blocks and links inside other posts should point at the new address, so visitors do not go through a redirect every time.
6. Check the sitemap. It should list only the new addresses. If you use Rank Math or Yoast, it updates by itself, but look once.
7. Leave the old address alone afterwards. Do not delete the redirect and do not reuse the old slug for a different post.

Common mistakes

• Changing slugs with a bulk database edit and never testing a single old URL.
• Using a 302 (temporary) redirect when the move is permanent.
• Redirecting every old address to the home page. Each old address should go to its own new page.
• Fixing the slug but leaving the old address in menus, sitemaps and internal links.

Where we are less sure

We cannot tell you how much a clean URL helps rankings. Google has not said emoji hurt, and our own posts rank low for reasons that have little to do with their slugs. We also cannot tell you how long Google keeps showing the old address. Google says old addresses become alternate names of the new one and fade over time, and it does not give a timeframe.

Quick checklist

• Old address returns 301, new address returns 200.
• Internal links and menus use the new address.
• Sitemap lists the new address only.
• Old address is not deleted and not reused.
• You checked Search Console again after a few weeks.

Frequently asked questions

Do emoji in URLs hurt rankings?

Google does not say they do. Its guidance is to use readable words and to percent-encode non-ASCII characters in links. We have no evidence either way from our own sites, so we treat clean URLs as a readability and sharing fix, not a ranking fix.

Will changing a slug make me lose my rankings?

A correct 301 redirect tells Google the page has permanently moved and that the new address is the preferred one. The risk comes from skipping the redirect, not from changing the slug itself. Check the redirect before you move on.

How long should I keep the redirect?

Google’s redirect guidance does not give a time limit. Our approach is to keep it for as long as the site exists, because it costs nothing and protects anyone who still has the old link.

Sources

• Google Search Central: URL structure best practices
• Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search
• Our own checks of therecipeworld.com in October 2026: redirect test results and Google Search Console reports.

If you also want to see which pages Google is actually showing, our post on finding invisible keywords in Google Search Console is a good next read.