What a slug is
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page — the best-coffee-in-2026 in /blog/best-coffee-in-2026. A good slug is descriptive, stable, and made only of safe characters, so it reads cleanly, survives copy-paste, and never needs percent-encoding.
Generating one is a small pipeline: transliterate accented letters to ASCII, lowercase everything, replace any run of non-alphanumeric characters with a single hyphen, and trim stray separators from the ends. Optionally drop stop words to tighten it up. The result is short, keyword-rich, and predictable.
It all happens in your browser as you type — nothing is sent anywhere.
Good slug vs. bad slug
Lowercase, hyphenated, ASCII, keyword-focused — readable and link-friendly.
Spaces, capitals, symbols, or query IDs — fragile and ugly when shared.
Where developers use it
Blog & CMS routes
Convert a post title into the URL path the moment an author hits publish.
Docs anchors
Turn a heading into a stable in-page anchor or file name for a docs site.
Product pages
Build /products/wireless-noise-cancelling-headphones from a product name.
Frequently asked questions
Short, lowercase, words separated by hyphens, and made of only letters, digits, and hyphens. It should describe the page in a few meaningful words — drop filler, keep the keywords a person (and a search engine) would expect.
Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator but an underscore as a word joiner, so my-page reads as two words while my_page can read as one. Hyphens are the long-standing SEO convention for URLs.
They're transliterated to their closest ASCII form — café becomes cafe, décor becomes decor — so the slug stays clean and universally typeable.
Optionally. Trimming words like the, a, of, and makes slugs shorter and keyword-dense, which many teams prefer. But don't strip so aggressively that the slug stops making sense — readability still matters. The toggle lets you choose.
Yes — a URL is part of a page's identity. If you change a published slug, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL so existing links and ranking aren't lost.