How to Make URL-Friendly Slugs

What a slug is

In the URL "https://example.com/blog/10-best-coffee-shops", the slug is "10-best-coffee-shops". It is the last segment of the path, and it does the dual job of telling readers what the page is about and giving search engines a keyword signal. Slugs appear in browser address bars, in shared links, and in search results, so they are seen as often as the page title itself.

Slug best practices for SEO

A few rules produce slugs that are both readable and search-friendly:

• Keep it lowercase. Uppercase letters cause case-sensitive matching problems and look inconsistent in shared links.
• Use hyphens to separate words. Hyphens are the standard word separator in URLs; spaces, underscores, and plus signs are not read as separators by search engines.
• Strip punctuation and special characters. Apostrophes, commas, colons, and accented characters get encoded into ugly percent-escaped sequences. Remove or transliterate them.
• Keep it short and keyword-focused. Include the words that matter for the page’s topic and drop filler like "the", "a", and "and" when they bloat the slug.
• Make it stable. Once a page is published, changing its slug breaks every inbound link. Choose a good slug once and keep it.

Examples

How titles become slugs:

When to use a slug generator

Use a slug generator whenever you publish a page, post, or product and need a permalink: blog articles, documentation pages, e-commerce product URLs, and category pages. It is also handy for naming files and folders that will be served over the web, where spaces and special characters cause problems. For related formatting, use the Case Converter to fix capitalisation first, or Text to List to turn several headings into a list of slugs at once.