A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page. For example, in https://example.com/my-blog-post, the slug is my-blog-post. Good slugs are lowercase, use hyphens instead of spaces, and contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Stop words are common words like the, a, and, of, in that are typically removed from slugs to keep URLs short and meaningful. For example My Tips for Writing becomes my-tips-writing rather than my-tips-for-writing.

Why use hyphens instead of underscores?

Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as word joiners. So blog-post is indexed as two words (blog and post) while blog_post is one word. Hyphens are the SEO-recommended separator for URL slugs.

URL Slug Generator — Convert Text to URL-Safe Slugs

Text to slugify

Separator

Case

Strip stop words

About the URL Slug Generator

A URL slug is the human-readable, URL-safe part of a web address that identifies a specific page. Good slugs are lowercase, hyphen-separated, and free of special characters. They improve both SEO and user experience: search engines use words in URLs as a relevance signal, and descriptive slugs help users understand where a link leads before clicking.

Rules for a good URL slug

Lowercase only — /My-Page and /my-page are treated as different URLs, causing duplicate content issues. Use lowercase throughout.
Hyphens, not underscores — Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as joining characters. my-page is two words; my_page is one compound term.
Remove stop words — "a", "the", "and", "of" can usually be removed without losing meaning, keeping slugs shorter.
Keep it short — 3-5 meaningful words is ideal. Long slugs are harder to share and may be truncated in search results.

Changing slugs after publication

Once a URL is indexed and linked to, changing the slug without a 301 redirect breaks incoming links and loses accumulated PageRank. If you must change a slug, always configure a permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one. Most CMS platforms do this automatically when you update a post slug.

Slug generation in popular frameworks

Most web frameworks provide built-in slug generation. Rails has parameterize. Django has slugify. WordPress generates slugs automatically from post titles. In JavaScript, the simplest approach is: convert to lowercase, replace spaces with hyphens, and remove characters that are not alphanumeric or hyphens.

JavaScript — str.toLowerCase().replace(/\s+/g,"-").replace(/[^a-z0-9-]/g,"")
Python — import re; re.sub(r"[^a-z0-9-]","",s.lower().replace(" ","-"))
Ruby on Rails — "My Title".parameterize returns "my-title"
WordPress — uses sanitize_title() which handles Unicode, stop words, and special characters

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a URL slug?

A URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page in a human-readable way. In "https://example.com/blog/how-to-bake-bread", the slug is "how-to-bake-bread". It is generated from the page title with spaces replaced by hyphens and special characters removed.

Should URL slugs use hyphens or underscores?

Use hyphens. Google explicitly recommends hyphens as word separators in URLs. Underscores are not treated as separators — "word_count" is indexed as a single token while "word-count" is indexed as two separate words. This affects how your pages rank for individual keyword searches.

Should I include the year in a URL slug?

Avoid year-dated slugs for evergreen content. A URL like /best-laptops-2024/ looks stale in 2026 and may discourage clicks in search results. Reserve dated slugs for genuinely time-specific content like annual reports or dated news articles.

How long should a URL slug be?

Keep slugs to 3-5 key words. Remove stop words (a, an, the, of, for) and focus on 2-4 meaningful keywords. Google recommends short URLs. Very long slugs are truncated in search results and harder to share in messages.

How do I redirect an old URL slug to a new one?

Apache (.htaccess): Redirect 301 /old-slug /new-slug. Nginx: return 301 /new-slug; inside a location block. WordPress: update the post slug and it creates the redirect automatically. Always use 301 (permanent) not 302 (temporary) to pass SEO value to the new URL.