Slug Generator

What a URL Slug Is

A slug is the human-readable tail of a URL that names a specific page. In example.com/blog/how-to-bake-bread, the slug is how-to-bake-bread. It is the part you can read aloud and actually understand, as opposed to an opaque numeric id. A good slug tells both the reader and the search engine what the page is about before anyone even clicks.

It matters for SEO because Google reads the words in the slug and treats hyphens as spaces between them. That is the single most important rule to remember: use hyphens, not underscores. Google joins words connected by an underscore, so word_two is read as the single token "wordtwo", while word-two is correctly read as two separate keywords. Getting this wrong quietly buries the keywords you were trying to surface.

Best Practices

A clean slug follows a short list of habits. Keep it lowercase, since some servers treat uppercase and lowercase paths as different pages. Use hyphens rather than underscores or spaces. Keep it short and focused on the keywords that matter, trimming filler words like a, the, and of when they add nothing. Strip out punctuation and special characters entirely, and transliterate accented letters so café becomes cafe rather than a percent-encoded mess.

Messy titles to clean slugs

Do Not Change a Live Slug Casually

Once a page is published and has been indexed, its slug is part of its identity. Every inbound link, every bookmark, and all the ranking authority the page has earned are tied to that exact URL. If you change the slug without setting up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one, those links break and the accumulated ranking largely evaporates. A 301 tells search engines the page moved permanently and passes the authority along, so if you must rename, always add the redirect at the same time.

The generator above slugifies your text entirely in your browser, so nothing you type is sent anywhere. Draft slugs for unpublished pages with no privacy worries at all.