How to Create SEO-Friendly URL Slugs
2026-07-25
The slug is the human-readable part of a URL, and it does real work. It appears under the title in search results, it is what people see when a link is pasted into a message, and it gives both readers and search engines a hint about the page before they open it.
Step by step
- Open the URL Slug Generator.
- Paste one title per line — a single headline or a whole content calendar.
- Set the separator, casing and maximum length.
- Copy the slugs, or download them for a CMS import.
Hyphens, not underscores
This one has a concrete answer. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner. That means my-new-post is read as three words while my_new_post can be read as one. Google has been explicit about preferring hyphens for well over a decade.
How long should a slug be?
Long enough to carry the main keywords and no longer. A slug that reproduces a fifteen-word headline is harder to read, uglier when shared, and more likely to be truncated in a search snippet. Somewhere around 50 to 60 characters is a sensible ceiling, and a good slug usually stops after three to six meaningful words.
The length cap here always trims at a word boundary, so you never end up with a half word dangling at the end.
Accents and other characters
Accented characters are decomposed and their marks removed, so "Café Münster" becomes cafe-munster rather than dropping those letters entirely. Punctuation, apostrophes and symbols are stripped, and runs of anything non-alphanumeric collapse into a single separator.
Stop words: sometimes
Removing a, the, of and similar words shortens a slug without losing much meaning. But it can make a short title read strangely, so the option is off by default — and the tool will never hand back an empty slug just because every word was a stop word.
Changing a slug after publishing
You can, but not casually. The old URL stops working, every link pointing at it breaks, and any ranking it had accumulated is at risk. If you must change one, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one at the same time.