Free URL Slug Generator

A URL slug is the human-readable, URL-friendly part of a web address that identifies a specific page. In the URL https://example.com/blog/how-to-write-better-slugs, the slug is "how-to-write-better-slugs". It should be descriptive, lowercase, and contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens — no spaces or special characters.

Always use hyphens, not underscores. Google treats hyphens as word separators (so "seo-friendly" is read as two words: "seo" and "friendly"), whereas underscores are treated as character joiners (so "seo_friendly" is read as one word: "seofriendly"). This means hyphens produce better keyword matching in search. John Mueller of Google has confirmed that hyphens are the recommended separator for URL slugs.

In most cases, yes. Stop words like "a", "an", "the", "of", and "in" add length without adding keyword value. For example, "how-to-write-the-best-seo-slugs" becomes "how-to-write-best-seo-slugs" — shorter and cleaner. However, if the stop word is part of a brand name or critical to meaning (e.g., "lord-of-the-rings"), keep it. Use your judgment and this tool's optional toggle.

Aim for 3–5 words (roughly 20–60 characters). Shorter slugs are easier to share, look cleaner, and are less likely to be truncated in search results and social media. Google's John Mueller has stated that Google does not have a specific length limit for URLs, but shorter URLs tend to perform better in practice. Avoid unnecessarily long slugs — trim stop words and redundant terms.

Yes, slugs have a moderate impact on SEO. Including your primary keyword in the slug helps search engines and users understand what the page is about. Google confirms that keywords in the URL are used as a ranking signal, though it is a lighter signal than title tags and content. More importantly, descriptive slugs improve click-through rate because users can read what a page is about from the URL alone before clicking.

Non-Latin characters (accented letters, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.) should be transliterated or romanized for maximum URL compatibility. While modern browsers and servers handle UTF-8 URLs, many tools and systems still have issues with non-ASCII characters. This tool automatically transliterates common accented characters (é→e, ñ→n, ü→u, ç→c) and strips characters it cannot transliterate. For non-Latin scripts, consider providing a manually transliterated alternative.

URL slugs are the clean path segment of a URL (e.g., /about-us or /product/blue-widget). Query strings (e.g., ?color=blue&size=large) come after the slug and are used for dynamic filtering. For SEO, prefer clean slugs in the path rather than relying on query strings for page identity — Google can crawl query parameters, but canonical paths rank more consistently.