What is a URL slug?
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page. In the URL https://example.com/blog/how-to-build-a-website/, the slug is "how-to-build-a-website". Slugs are important for both usability (readable URLs communicate what a page is about) and SEO (relevant keywords in URLs contribute marginally to search ranking).
The term "slug" comes from newspaper publishing, where a slug was a short name given to an article during production before its final headline was set.
What makes a good URL slug
A good slug is lowercase, uses hyphens to separate words, contains the most important keywords from the title, and is short enough to be readable and shareable. It avoids stop words (a, the, and, or, in, on, at) that add length without adding meaning. It uses only ASCII characters — accented characters are either transliterated (é → e) or removed. It never contains spaces, special characters, or uppercase letters.
How the converter works
Paste or type any title, heading, or phrase. The converter normalises the text: converts to lowercase, replaces accented characters with their ASCII equivalents, removes non-alphanumeric characters, and joins words with the selected separator. The slug preview and full URL preview update instantly as you type.
Separator options
Hyphens (-) are the correct choice for almost all use cases. Google's John Mueller has confirmed that Google treats hyphens as word separators in URLs, meaning keywords are properly parsed. WordPress, most CMS platforms, and the majority of style guides all default to hyphens. Underscores (_) are sometimes used in older systems and some Python web frameworks. No separator produces a compact single string (howtobuildaslug) which is compact but unreadable and not recommended for SEO or usability.
Stop word removal
Stop words are extremely common words (a, an, the, and, or, but, in, on, at, to, for) that add length to a slug without adding meaning or keyword relevance. "how-to-build-a-personal-brand-in-2025" contains three stop words (a, to, in) that could be removed to give "how-build-personal-brand-2025". Whether to remove stop words is a matter of preference — shorter is generally better for slugs, but "how-to-build" reads more naturally than "how-build".
SEO considerations
URL slugs are a minor but real SEO signal. Include your primary keyword in the slug if it fits naturally. Keep slugs under 60 characters where possible — extremely long slugs are truncated in search results and look unwieldy when shared. Avoid repeating keywords (keyword stuffing in URLs is counterproductive). Once a URL is indexed and has backlinks, changing it requires 301 redirects to preserve SEO value — choose slugs carefully the first time.
Accented character handling
The converter transliterates common accented characters to their ASCII equivalents: é → e, ü → u, ñ → n, ç → c, ß → ss, and so on. This is the standard approach for English-language content management systems. Non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese) are removed as they would require percent-encoding in URLs, making them unreadable in browsers that display the encoded form.