Stax

Text to Slug Generator

Convert any title or text into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug.

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What makes a good URL slug?

A well-crafted URL slug improves both SEO and user experience. Search engines read slugs as a strong signal about page content, and descriptive slugs get higher click-through rates in search results because users can understand the page topic before clicking.

Slug best practices

  • Use lowercase letters only
  • Separate words with hyphens (not underscores)
  • Remove special characters and punctuation
  • Keep it under 60 characters
  • Include the primary keyword
  • Remove unnecessary stop words (a, an, the, and, or, but)
  • Avoid dates unless the content is time-sensitive

Hyphen vs underscore: which to use?

For public-facing URLs and blog posts, always use hyphens (-). Hyphens are the standard for web URLs and are recognised as word separators by search engines. Underscores are appropriate for internal technical identifiers (database fields, API query parameters) where SEO is not a concern.

Frequently asked questions

What is a URL slug?
A URL slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in a human-readable way. For example, in the URL example.com/blog/how-to-build-great-products, the slug is 'how-to-build-great-products'. Slugs are lowercase, use hyphens instead of spaces, and contain only alphanumeric characters.
Why do slugs use hyphens instead of spaces or underscores?
Google's John Mueller has confirmed that hyphens are treated as word separators in URLs, making individual words identifiable by search engines. Underscores are treated as word joiners (combining words into one). Spaces are percent-encoded (%20) which is less readable. Hyphens are the SEO-recommended separator for most CMS platforms including WordPress, Ghost, and Shopify.
How long should a URL slug be?
There is no hard limit, but SEO best practice is to keep slugs under 60 characters. Shorter, more descriptive slugs tend to rank better and are easier to share. Remove stop words like 'a', 'an', 'the', 'and', 'or' to keep slugs concise without losing meaning.
Should I use lowercase for URL slugs?
Yes — always use lowercase for URL slugs. Mixed-case URLs can cause duplicate content issues if the server treats /Blog/Post and /blog/post as the same page but Google indexes them as separate URLs. Most web servers and CMS platforms enforce lowercase slugs by default.
What happens to special characters in slugs?
Characters outside the safe URL set (letters, digits, hyphens, underscores) should be removed or replaced. Accented characters (é, ü, ñ) are first normalized to their base ASCII equivalent (e, u, n) using Unicode normalization (NFD decomposition). Punctuation, symbols, and non-Latin scripts are stripped out.

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