URL Slug Generator — SEO Best Practices
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. For example, in the URL https://example.com/how-to-build-a-website, the slug is how-to-build-a-website. Creating clean, descriptive slugs is one of the simplest and most effective SEO improvements you can make.
What Makes a Good URL Slug?
- Use hyphens, not underscores: Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as part of the same word. "word-count" is better than "word_count" for SEO.
- Keep it short: Shorter URLs are easier to share and remember. Aim for under 5 words when possible.
- Include your main keyword: Your primary keyword should appear in the slug for SEO benefit.
- Use lowercase: URLs are case-sensitive on Linux servers. Uppercase letters can cause duplicate content issues.
- Remove stop words: Remove "a", "the", "and", "of" to keep slugs concise (optional but recommended).
- No special characters: Characters like !, @, #, &, % can break URLs and cause encoding issues.
How Our Slug Generator Works
Our tool converts text to a URL slug in four steps: (1) converts to lowercase, (2) removes all characters except letters, numbers, spaces, and hyphens, (3) replaces spaces and multiple hyphens with a single separator, (4) trims leading and trailing separators. This produces clean, SEO-ready slugs every time.
Slug Best Practices by Platform
- WordPress: Automatically generates slugs from titles. Use our tool to preview and optimize before publishing.
- Shopify: Product slugs are auto-generated. Keep product names clean and keyword-rich.
- Custom websites: Always sanitize user-submitted slugs to prevent security vulnerabilities.