A slug in one example
Take the address example.com/blog/how-to-clean-white-sneakers. The domain is example.com, blog is a folder or section, and how-to-clean-white-sneakers is the slug. It identifies this one page inside the site, and it is what people see in the address bar, in shared links and often in search results.
The name comes from newspaper publishing, where a slug was a short working title for a story as it moved through the newsroom. Content management systems such as WordPress, Shopify and most blog platforms create a slug from the title automatically and let you edit it before publishing.
Try it here: Slug Generator
Open the full tool pageWhat makes a slug SEO friendly
- Describe the page in a few words, using the term people search for: white-sneakers-cleaning, not post-1847 or page-id-23.
- Use lowercase only. Many servers treat Shoes and shoes as different addresses, which can create duplicates or broken links.
- Separate words with hyphens. Google recommends hyphens rather than underscores, because an underscore can join words together.
- Keep it short. Three to six words is typical; long slugs get cut off when displayed and are hard to share.
- Use only letters a to z, digits and hyphens. Spaces become %20, and characters like ?, #, & and / have special meanings in URLs.
- Avoid dates and numbers that will change, such as 2026 or 7-tips, unless the page is truly about that year or that count.
Title to slug examples
| Page title | Weak slug | Better slug |
|---|---|---|
| How to Clean White Sneakers Without Damaging Them | how-to-clean-white-sneakers-without-damaging-them | clean-white-sneakers |
| 10 Best Coffee Grinders for Espresso in 2026 | 10-best-coffee-grinders-for-espresso-in-2026 | best-espresso-grinders |
| Crème Brûlée Recipe | cr%C3%A8me-br%C3%BBl%C3%A9e-recipe | creme-brulee-recipe |
| Size & Color Guide | size-color-guide or size-&-color | size-and-color-guide |
| Product: Men's Running Shoe X200 | Mens_Running_Shoe_X200 | mens-running-shoe-x200 |
Length and stop words
There is no fixed character limit for slugs that search engines enforce, and a slightly longer slug does not hurt ranking by itself. Short slugs are simply easier to read, remember and share. A practical target is under about 60 characters for the slug, and many sites stay under 40.
Stop words are short filler words such as a, the, of, and, to and for. Removing them often shortens a slug without losing meaning: how-to-make-cold-brew-coffee can become make-cold-brew-coffee. Keep them when they carry meaning, as in to-be-or-not-to-be or a product name that includes them. The generator's Remove filler words option drops them only when the title has more than two words, so a short title is never emptied.
Accents and non-Latin characters
Modern browsers and search engines handle accented and non-Latin characters in URLs. Behind the scenes, though, they are percent-encoded: é becomes %C3%A9. The address bar shows the pretty version, but when the link is copied into an email, a spreadsheet or a chat, it often appears as a long string of percent codes. Older systems and some analytics tools also handle these characters inconsistently.
For languages that use the Latin alphabet with accents, the common and safe choice is to replace each letter with its plain version: é to e, ñ to n, ç to c, ğ to g, ı to i. German has a convention of its own: ä, ö and ü are written ae, oe and ue, and ß becomes ss. The generator does this when German is selected in Language, and it writes & as the word for and in the chosen language (and, y, und, et).
For Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and other scripts, sites either keep native script slugs, which local users can read, or transliterate them to Latin letters. Both work for search engines. The generator on this page only keeps Latin letters and digits and removes characters from other scripts, so for those languages transliterate the title first or write the slug by hand.
Changing a slug and redirects
Changing a slug changes the address of the page. Every existing link, bookmark and search result still points to the old address and will lead to a 404 error unless you redirect it. If you change a slug, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, update internal links and the sitemap, and check that the canonical tag points to the new URL.
Search engines transfer the old page's signals through a 301 redirect, but recrawling takes time and the page may fluctuate for a while. Change slugs only for a good reason, such as a misleading or very long slug, not to chase a slightly different keyword. Most platforms, including WordPress and Shopify, can create the redirect automatically or through a setting or plugin.
Slugs for online stores and bulk lists
Stores, marketplaces and catalog sites often need slugs for hundreds of products at once, usually from a spreadsheet column of names. Paste the whole column into the generator: every line gets its slug in the same order, and empty lines stay empty, so the result lines up row by row when you paste it back next to the names.
If two products have the same name, they will get the same slug. Add something that makes each unique, such as the color, size or model number, before generating, because most systems append -1 or -2 automatically, which says nothing to a visitor.