What is a URL slug? Best practices with examples

A URL slug is the part of a web address that names a single page in plain words. In https://texttoolset.com/blog/what-is-a-url-slug, the slug is what-is-a-url-slug. Everything before it (the scheme, the domain and the /blog/ folder) is shared with other pages, while the slug is different for each one. Good slugs are short, lowercase, made of real words that describe the page, and use hyphens between words. To turn a title into one, paste it into the text to slug converter.

Where the slug sits in a URL

Part	In this example	What it does
Scheme	https://	How the browser connects
Domain	texttoolset.com	Which website
Path folder	/blog/	Which section of the site
Slug	what-is-a-url-slug	Which page

In WordPress, the %postname% permalink tag is described as “a sanitized version of the title of the post”, taken from the post slug field, so “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post. The WordPress default, “Plain”, uses addresses like example.com/?p=N, with a database ID instead of words, and the WordPress documentation calls this the “Ugly Permalink”.

What makes a good slug

Google’s URL structure guidelines give the main rules. The table sums them up with the reason behind each one.

Rule	Good	Avoid	Why
Use readable words	/wiki/aviation	/index.php?topic=42&area=3a5e	Google recommends “readable words rather than long ID numbers”
Separate words with hyphens	remove-duplicate-lines	remove_duplicate_lines, removeduplicatelines	Google recommends hyphens instead of underscores
Keep it lowercase	/blog/title-case-rules	/blog/Title-Case-Rules	Paths are case-sensitive, so two capitalizations are two URLs
Plain letters and digits only	whats-new-in-2026	what's-new-in-2026?	Punctuation such as ?, # and & has a special meaning in URLs
Keep it short and specific	creme-brulee-recipe	the-best-and-easiest-creme-brulee-recipe-you-will-ever-make	Easier to read, share and type
Use your readers’ language	/de/strasse for German readers	an English slug on a German page	Google advises words in the audience’s language, transliterated if needed

Two of these rules come from the URL standard itself. RFC 3986 lists the “unreserved” characters that can appear in a URL without any special meaning: uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, hyphen, period, underscore and tilde. Anything else either has a job (? starts the query, # starts a fragment, / separates folders) or must be percent-encoded. The same standard says the scheme and the host are case-insensitive but that other parts, including the path, “are assumed to be case-sensitive”. Google follows this: its guidelines say /APPLE and /apple are treated as distinct URLs. If your site lets both work, you may end up with two addresses for one page.

How a title becomes a slug

Most slug generators follow the same steps. This is exactly what our text to slug tool does with each line you paste:

1. Spell out compatibility characters: the ligature fi becomes fi, a superscript ² becomes 2 and ½ becomes 1 and 2 (½ cup gives 1-2-cup).
2. Replace & with the word “and”.
3. Delete apostrophes, both straight (’) and curly (’), so “what’s” becomes “whats” rather than “what-s”.
4. Remove accents: é becomes e, ü becomes u, and letters that do not decompose are mapped too (ß to ss, æ to ae, ø to o, ł to l).
5. Lowercase everything (the Lowercase option, on by default).
6. Treat every run of characters that is not a plain letter A–Z or a digit as a single break, and join the words with the Separator (hyphen by default, or underscore).

Here are real outputs from the tool with its default settings:

Title	Slug
10 Tips for Writing Better Titles	10-tips-for-writing-better-titles
Crème Brûlée: The Chef’s Recipe!	creme-brulee-the-chefs-recipe
What’s New in 2026?	whats-new-in-2026
Salt & Pepper Shrimp	salt-and-pepper-shrimp
Straße in Łódź	strasse-in-lodz
50% Off — Today Only	50-off-today-only
C++ vs C#: Which to Learn?	c-vs-c-which-to-learn

The last row shows why you should always read the result. Symbols carry meaning in “C++” and “C#”, and the slug loses it, so a hand-written cpp-vs-csharp is clearer. Slug tools also keep only Latin letters and digits: a title written entirely in another script, such as Привет мир, gives an empty slug (the tool then names the line that came out empty), and 東京 travel guide gives just travel-guide. For those pages, write a transliterated slug yourself or keep the original letters (see the accents section below).

Short words and length

Long titles make long slugs. There are two simple ways to trim them, and the tool has an option for each.

Drop short words. Words like “a”, “the”, “of” and “in” rarely add meaning to a slug. With Drop short words (a, the, of…) turned on, the tool removes a, an, the, and, or, of, to, in, on, for, with, at, by and from, but only when the slug has more than two words, so short titles stay intact:

Title	Default	Drop short words
A Guide to the Best Coffee Shops in Paris	a-guide-to-the-best-coffee-shops-in-paris	guide-best-coffee-shops-paris
Of Mice and Men	of-mice-and-men	mice-men
The Office	the-office	the-office

“Of Mice and Men” shows the downside: mice-men is no longer the book title. Drop short words when they are filler, and keep them when they are part of a name.

Set a maximum length. With Max length set to a number, the tool cuts the slug to that many characters and then goes back to the last separator, so a word is not chopped in half. With a limit of 30, how-to-remove-duplicate-lines-in-excel becomes how-to-remove-duplicate-lines. If there is no separator in the second half of the limit, the cut is made exactly at the limit, which can split a long word, so check those results by hand.

There is no official character limit for slugs. Aim for the few words that name the topic, and remember that the full URL, not just the slug, is what people see and share.

Accents and non-English slugs

You have two choices for letters outside A–Z. You can transliterate them into plain ASCII (creme-brulee, sao-paulo), which our remove accents tool does on any text, including the ß, æ, ø and ł conversions. Or you can keep them. Google’s guidelines allow non-ASCII words but say they should be percent-encoded in the URL. In encoded form, the accented slug looks like this:

crème-brûlée  →  cr%C3%A8me-br%C3%BBl%C3%A9e

For an English-language site, plain ASCII slugs are the simpler choice. For a site written in Russian, Arabic or Japanese, Google’s guidance to use words in the audience’s language points the other way. The guide to URL encoding explains how percent-encoding works, and the URL encoder shows the encoded form of any text.

Changing a slug after publishing

A slug is part of the page’s address, so changing it changes the URL. Links from other sites, bookmarks, shared posts and search results still point to the old one. WordPress calls its URLs permalinks because they “should never be changed”.

If you must change a slug (for a typo, or a page that now covers a different topic), set up a redirect from the old address to the new one. Google’s documentation on redirects recommends “a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible”, which means an HTTP 301 or 308 status code. Old links keep being used long after the change, so do not plan to remove the redirect soon. This site follows that rule: the old addresses of the previous version of texttoolset.com still work.

Slugs and other naming styles

A slug is a close relative of kebab-case, the lowercase-with-hyphens style used for CSS classes and file names. The difference is that a slug generator also strips accents, apostrophes and symbols so the result is safe in a URL. If you need the same words as camelCase or snake_case for code, see camelCase vs snake_case vs kebab-case or use the kebab-case converter.