How to Create SEO-Friendly URL Slugs (Rules + Free Slug Generator)

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL after the domain. Good slugs help both users and search engines understand what's on a page before they click.

What makes a slug SEO-friendly

• All lowercase (URLs are case-sensitive on most servers — avoid mixed case)
• Hyphens between words, never underscores or spaces
• Short — 3 to 5 meaningful words is the sweet spot
• Contains the primary keyword
• No stop words like 'the', 'a', 'and' unless they change meaning
• ASCII only — strip accents and non-Latin characters

Bad vs good slugs

• Bad: /Blog_Post_2026_FINAL_v3.html → Good: /seo-friendly-url-slugs
• Bad: /article?id=82917 → Good: /how-to-format-json
• Bad: /café-recettes → Good: /cafe-recipes

Generate slugs automatically

Paste any title into our Slug Generator tool and it will lowercase, strip accents, remove special characters, and hyphenate spaces in one step. For bulk renames you can also normalize casing with Case Converter.

When you need percent-encoding

If your slug must include non-ASCII characters (rare, but possible for international SEO), encode them with URL Encoder / Decoder so browsers and crawlers handle them correctly.