Slug Generator / URL Cleaner

What Is a URL Slug?

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page. In "example.com/blog/how-to-build-a-website," the slug is "how-to-build-a-website." Good slugs are short, descriptive, and keyword-rich. They help both users and search engines understand what a page is about before even clicking the link.

URL Best Practices for SEO

Google recommends keeping URLs simple, descriptive, and relevant. Use your primary keyword in the URL. Keep slugs short (3-5 words is ideal). Use hyphens to separate words (not underscores — Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as word joiners). Avoid unnecessary parameters, session IDs, or meaningless numbers in URLs.

Hyphens vs Underscores

Google's official recommendation is to use hyphens (-) as word separators in URLs. Matt Cutts (former Google engineer) explained that Google treats hyphens as spaces between words, so "web-design" is interpreted as "web design." Underscores join words, so "web_design" might be interpreted as "webdesign." This distinction can affect how Google matches search queries to your URLs.

Stop Words in URLs

Stop words (a, an, the, of, in, for, etc.) add length without adding value. "how-to-build-a-great-website-in-2025" could be shortened to "build-great-website-2025" without losing meaning. However, don't obsess over removing stop words if they make the URL more readable. Google can handle stop words fine — the main goal is keeping URLs concise and meaningful.

Handling Special Characters

URL slugs should only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. Accented characters (é, ü, ñ) should be transliterated to their ASCII equivalents. Special characters and spaces must be removed or replaced. This ensures maximum compatibility across all browsers, servers, and platforms without encoding issues.