What Is a URL Slug? How to Make Clean, Readable URLs

Look at the address bar of this page and you'll see the words of the title, lowercased and joined by hyphens. That's a slug — the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page. Getting slugs right makes URLs easier to read, share, and rank. This guide explains how.

What a slug is

A slug is the final, descriptive segment of a URL, derived from a page's title:

Title:  What Is a URL Slug?
Slug:   what-is-a-url-slug
URL:    example.com/guides/what-is-a-url-slug

Compare that to example.com/?p=8412 — the slug version tells both people and search engines what the page is about before they even click.

Why clean slugs matter

• Readability & trust: a clear URL is easier to read aloud, type, and trust than a string of numbers.
• SEO: keywords in the slug are a small ranking signal and show up as bold text in search results.
• Sharing: descriptive links get clicked more when pasted into chats and social posts.

The rules for a good slug

• Lowercase everything — URLs can be case-sensitive, so mixed case invites duplicates.
• Replace spaces with hyphens (-), not underscores; search engines treat hyphens as word separators.
• Remove punctuation and symbols.
• Transliterate accented characters (café → cafe) so the URL doesn't fill with percent-encoding.
• Keep it short — drop filler words like “the” and “a” where you can.

Accents and non-Latin text

Characters outside the basic set get percent-encoded in a URL, turning café into caf%C3%A9. A good slug generator transliterates them to plain ASCII first, so the URL stays readable.

Generating slugs

Rather than fixing all of that by hand, paste any title into the slug generator and get a clean, URL-safe slug instantly. If you're also deciding how to name variables or files around your content, our guide to naming case styles covers the related conventions, and the case converter switches between them.