What Is a URL Slug, and How Do You Create One?
A slug is the readable part at the end of a web address - the words after the last slash that say what the page is. The Text to Slug Converter turns any title into one.
What makes a good slug
Lowercase, words separated by hyphens, nothing else. Letters, digits and hyphens are the safe set; everything else either needs encoding or behaves inconsistently.
Hyphens rather than underscores, because search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so an underscored slug reads as one long word. No spaces, which become percent-twenty and make a link ugly wherever it is pasted. No accents or non-Latin characters unless you are prepared for them to be percent-encoded, which turns a readable address into a wall of escapes when someone copies it.
Short, too. Three to five meaningful words is plenty, and dropping the filler - a, the, of, how, to - loses nothing. A title of twelve words does not need a slug of twelve words.
Describe the page, not the title
The slug should say what the page is about, which is not always what the headline says. A post titled "Seven Things Nobody Tells You About Sourdough" is better served by a slug about sourdough mistakes than by seven-things-nobody-tells-you. The headline is written to be clicked; the slug is written to be read in a link and understood out of context.
Resist dates and ids unless they are genuinely part of the identity. A slug with last year's date in it looks stale forever, and a numeric id tells nobody anything.
Changing one is expensive
This is the part worth internalising. A slug is a promise. Every link anyone has made, every bookmark, every share, and all the ranking the page has earned are attached to that exact address.
Change it and all of that breaks unless you add a permanent redirect from the old address to the new one. A redirect preserves most of the value but not all of it, and it is one more thing to maintain. So spend the extra minute before publishing, and afterwards leave it alone - an imperfect slug costs far less than a changed one.
Common questions
Should the slug match the title exactly?
No. Match the subject, and keep it shorter than the title.
Do keywords in a slug help ranking?
A little, and the effect is small next to the content itself. Write it for a human reading the link.
Can a slug contain a number?
Yes, when the number is part of the meaning - a year in a guide that is genuinely about that year, or a version. Avoid incidental ones.
What if two pages need the same slug?
They cannot have it. That is usually a sign the two pages overlap enough to be one page.
Does capitalisation matter?
Some servers treat addresses as case-sensitive and some do not, which is exactly why lowercase everywhere avoids the question.
Got a title to turn into an address?