What Is a URL Slug?
A URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page in a human-readable format. For example, in the URL example.com/my-blog-post-title, the slug is my-blog-post-title.
Slugs are created by converting a title or phrase into a lowercase, hyphen-separated string that contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens. Special characters, spaces, and punctuation are removed or replaced.
Why Are Slugs Important for SEO?
- Search engine ranking — Google considers URL structure as a ranking factor. Clean, descriptive URLs perform better than random IDs or query strings.
- User experience — Readable URLs help users understand what a page is about before clicking.
/how-to-learn-pythonis far more informative than/post?id=48273. - Link sharing — Clean slugs look professional when shared on social media, emails, and messaging apps.
- Accessibility — Screen readers can interpret well-formed slugs more effectively than encoded special characters.
Best practice: Keep slugs short, descriptive, and keyword-rich. Avoid stop words (a, the, is, and) when possible. Use hyphens, not underscores — Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as word joiners.
How Our Slug Generator Works
- Lowercase conversion — All letters are converted to lowercase for consistency.
- Special character removal — Punctuation, symbols, and non-alphanumeric characters are stripped.
- Space replacement — Spaces and consecutive whitespace are replaced with a single hyphen.
- Trim — Leading and trailing hyphens are removed for a clean result.
Frequently Asked Questions
What characters are allowed in a slug?
Our generator produces slugs containing only lowercase letters (a-z), digits (0-9), and hyphens (-). This is the safest, most universally compatible format for URLs across all web platforms and CMS systems.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in slugs?
Use hyphens (-). Google officially recommends hyphens over underscores because their algorithm treats hyphens as word separators. The URL my-page is interpreted as “my page,” while my_page is treated as a single word “mypage.”