What a slug is
A slug is the human-readable tail end of a URL — the part that identifies one specific page on your site. In the address asistente-rd.com/how-to-make-coffee, the slug is how-to-make-coffee. It’s written in lowercase, with no accents or spaces, using hyphens to separate words. A good slug can be understood at a glance by both a reader and a search engine.
This generator turns any title or phrase into a clean slug instantly, right in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server: all of the processing happens on your device.
Why slugs matter for SEO
The URL is one of the first things Google sees and one of the things it shows in the search results. A descriptive slug with the right keywords helps both the reader and the crawler understand what a page is about before they open it. A URL like /product?id=8837 says nothing; /mens-running-shoes says plenty.
Clean URLs also travel better: they read well inside a WhatsApp message, an email, or a social post, and they inspire more confidence when someone decides to click.
How to use the generator
- Type or paste your text into the top field (an article title, a product name, a category).
- Choose the separator: hyphen (
-) or underscore (_). - Decide whether to keep uppercase letters. It’s off by default, which is the recommended setting.
- Copy the slug with the button. It updates live as you type.
How the slug is built
The process applies four rules in order:
- Lowercase: everything is converted to lowercase (unless you turn on “keep uppercase”).
- No accents: the text is normalized and diacritics are stripped, so
ábecomesaandñbecomesn. - Separators: any character that isn’t a letter or a number (spaces, commas, symbols) is replaced by the separator, and runs of them collapse into a single one.
- Trim: leftover separators at the start and end are removed.
Worked example
Start from the title “How to Make Coffee with Milk”:
| Step | Result |
|---|---|
| Original | How to Make Coffee with Milk |
| Lowercase | how to make coffee with milk |
| Spaces to hyphens | how-to-make-coffee-with-milk |
| Trimmed | how-to-make-coffee-with-milk |
The final slug is how-to-make-coffee-with-milk: 28 characters, all lowercase and easy to read.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is a slug?
It’s the readable identifier of a page inside a URL, usually derived from its title. It replaces unclear numeric IDs with words that describe the content, which improves both the user experience and search ranking.
Hyphen or underscore for SEO?
Hyphen (-). Google has recommended the plain hyphen as a word separator in URLs for years, because it treats it as a space and reads each word separately. The underscore (_) tends to join words together, so keep it for code — variable names and filenames — rather than URLs.
What’s the ideal slug length?
Shorter and clearer is better. As a practical rule of thumb, try to stay under 60 characters and use three to five words carrying the main idea. Drop filler words (the, a, and) when they add no meaning, but never at the cost of readability.
Can I change the slug of a page I’ve already published?
Best avoided. If you change a slug, the old URL stops working and you lose the links and ranking it had built up. If it’s truly necessary, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so you keep the traffic.