A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. For example, in https://example.com/blog/best-seo-tools, the slug is "best-seo-tools". It is lowercase, uses hyphens between words, and contains only URL-safe characters (a-z, 0-9, hyphens).

Why do slugs matter for SEO?

Google reads the URL path as a ranking signal. A slug that mirrors the primary keyword phrase — like "wordpress-seo-guide" for a WordPress SEO article — reinforces topical relevance. Short, descriptive slugs are also more clickable in search results and easier to share. Google's John Mueller has confirmed that words in the URL path carry a mild but real ranking weight.

Should I use hyphens or underscores in URL slugs?

Use hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, so "seo-tools" is read as two words: "seo" and "tools". Underscores are treated as word joiners, making "seo_tools" a single token that only matches that exact string. Hyphens also score better in readability tests and are the convention used by WordPress, Shopify, and most major CMS platforms.

What are stop-words and should I remove them from slugs?

Stop-words are common function words — a, an, the, and, of, for, in, at, to, is, with — that carry little topical meaning. Removing them shortens the slug and increases keyword density. "the-best-coffee-shops-in-london" becomes "best-coffee-shops-london". However, if the stop-word is part of a brand name or famous phrase, keep it. Use the toggle to compare both versions.

How long should a URL slug be?

Aim for 20-75 characters. Google displays roughly 75-80 characters of a URL path in search snippets before truncating with an ellipsis. Very short slugs (under 20 characters) can be too generic; very long slugs dilute keyword focus and are harder to share. The SEO quality checker built into this tool flags anything outside the optimal range.

Does changing a slug hurt SEO?

Yes, if done without a 301 redirect. The slug is part of the canonical URL. If you change it and leave the old URL returning a 404 or 200 with duplicate content, you lose any link equity pointing at the old address. Always set up a permanent (301) redirect from the old slug to the new one before republishing. For brand-new pages there is no cost — use the best slug from the start.

URL Slug Generator for SEO

A well-crafted URL slug is one of the cheapest SEO wins available: it costs nothing to get right the first time, costs a 301 redirect to fix later, and signals keyword relevance to every crawler that visits your site. This tool converts any page title or heading into a clean, search-engine-friendly slug with one click — and then scores the result against six real SEO checks so you know whether it will help or hurt rankings before you publish.

How the slug algorithm works

The generator applies a precise, ordered pipeline to every input string:

Unicode transliteration. Accented Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and common symbol characters are mapped to their ASCII equivalents before anything else (so “Ångström” becomes “angstrom”, “café” becomes “cafe”, ”&” becomes “and”).
Case normalisation. If lowercase mode is on (default), the entire string is lowercased.
Separator substitution. Any run of whitespace, hyphens, underscores or dots is collapsed into a single instance of your chosen separator.
Unsafe character stripping. Every character that is not alphanumeric or the chosen separator is removed. This leaves only characters that are universally safe in URL paths without percent-encoding.
Stop-word removal (optional). The slug is split on the separator, each word is checked against a 50-word stop-word list, and filler words are dropped. A one-word slug is never fully emptied by this step.
Max-length truncation. If you set a limit (default 75), the slug is cut at the last full word boundary before that limit, preventing mid-word cuts.

Worked example

Input: "How to Build a High-Converting Landing Page in 2024"

With defaults (lowercase, hyphens, max 75):

how-to-build-a-high-converting-landing-page-in-2024

Enable Remove stop-words and the filler words (how, to, a, in) are dropped:

build-high-converting-landing-page-2024

That is 38 characters — comfortably inside the 20-75 sweet-spot — and every remaining word is a ranking keyword.

The SEO quality checklist

The tool runs six checks in real time:

Check	Target	Why it matters
Length 20-75 chars	Pass	Google truncates longer paths in snippets
No stop-words	Pass	More keywords per character of URL
No consecutive separators	Pass	Signals malformed input
Starts/ends with alphanumeric	Pass	Crawlers expect clean path segments
All lowercase	Pass	Prevents duplicate URL variants
ASCII characters only	Pass	Avoids percent-encoding in shared links

Formula note

The core logic is purely string manipulation — no mathematical formula is involved. The one nuance worth noting is the max-length boundary detection: the tool finds the last occurrence of the separator at position (index <= maxLength) and cuts there, ensuring the truncated slug always ends on a complete word rather than mid-character. This is equivalent to slug.slice(0, maxLength).lastIndexOf(separator) with a fallback to a hard cut when no separator exists within the limit.