URL Slug Generator

What a slug is and why it matters

The slug is the portion of a URL that identifies a specific resource, after the domain and folder segments. In https://genfy.net/blog/url-slug-generator, the slug is url-slug-generator. It's the first thing a user sees before clicking, what gets shared on Slack or WhatsApp, what shows up under your title in Google.

Golden rules of a good slug

• Always lowercase. URLs are case-sensitive on many servers — /Blog and /blog can be two distinct pages. Forcing lowercase prevents accidental duplicates.
• Only a-z, 0-9 and hyphens. Special characters get URL-encoded (ñ becomes %C3%B1) and the result looks ugly, runs long, and breaks when copied by hand.
• No accents. "café" turns to "cafe". Modern browsers handle accents, but the global convention is ASCII for maximum compatibility across systems.
• Short but descriptive. Ideally 3 to 6 words. Longer slugs add friction when sharing.
• Drop unnecessary stop words. Cut articles like "the", "a", "an", "of" when they don't add meaning.

Hyphen vs underscore: the settled debate

Matt Cutts, the former Google web spam team lead, clarified years ago that hyphens function as word separators while underscores join words. So how-to-bake-bread tells Google there are three independent words; how_to_bake_bread reads as a single string. For SEO, always hyphens.

Slugs and SEO in 2026

Google still uses the slug as one of dozens of signals to understand a URL's content and context. It isn't the most important factor (content and links weigh far more), but it's one of the few you can edit directly without rewriting copy or code. A slug echoing the article's main keyword reinforces relevance. A generic slug like /post-12345 leaves everything to the title tag.

Common mistakes

• Changing slugs live without a 301 redirect. If your post had 200 backlinks and you change the slug, you lose all of them. Always set up a redirect.
• Dates in slugs. /2024/03/article ages badly. If you refresh the content in 2026, the slug lies.
• Internal IDs. /post?id=842 is terrible for SEO and confuses users.
• Excessive stop words. "the-best-article-about-how-to-bake-bread-at-home-step-by-step" fits but overwhelms.

How to use this generator

Paste your title exactly as you wrote it. Keep the lowercase option on (always recommended). If your CMS doesn't strip stop words automatically, toggle that checkbox. Pick hyphen unless your system requires otherwise (Notion, for instance, defaults to hyphens). Copy the result and paste it into the "slug" or "permalink" field of your CMS.