What Is a URL Slug? How to Write a Good One (With Examples)

By HSP · Published October 22, 2026 · 6 min read · Developer Guides

Every page on a website has an address, and most of that address is fixed: the domain, then maybe a folder such as /blog/ or /shop/. The bit at the end is the part you actually choose. It is called the slug, a word borrowed from old newspaper offices, where editors gave each story a short working name while it moved through the building. On the web, the slug does the same job. It tells people, and search engines, what this one page is about before they even click.

Where the slug sits in a URL

Take the address https://www.example.com/recipes/easy-banana-bread?ref=newsletter and split it up:

The query string after the question mark is not part of the slug. Tracking tags such as utm_source belong there, and our UTM Builder adds them for you without touching the slug itself.

What makes a good slug

• Describes the page in real words. Google's own URL guidance recommends readable words rather than long ID numbers, because both people and crawlers understand /wiki/aviation faster than /index.php?topic=42&area=3a5e.
• Uses hyphens between words. Google specifically recommends hyphens over underscores. Programmers use underscores to glue words into one name (like format_date), while a hyphen clearly marks where one word ends and the next starts. Running words together (greendress) is worse still.
• Is all lowercase. URLs are case sensitive, so /Banana-Bread and /banana-bread can be two different addresses. Sticking to lowercase avoids duplicates and broken links when someone types the address by hand.
• Is short. There is no official character limit for a slug, but three to six meaningful words is a comfortable target. Short slugs are easier to read in search results, share in a chat and remember.
• Uses plain letters and numbers. Spaces, accents and symbols get percent-encoded in the browser, so a space becomes %20 and é becomes %C3%A9. Our guide to URL encoding explains why, and the URL Encoder and Decoder lets you see the encoded form of any text.
• Uses your readers' language. Google notes that a German audience is better served by German words in the URL. If your page is in Hindi or French, a slug in that language (or a simple transliteration) is perfectly fine.

Good and bad slug examples

Notice the year was dropped from the photo editor slug. If you update that list every year, a slug without a date can stay the same forever, while the title and content change. Only keep a date in the slug when the page is truly about one moment, such as an event or a news story.

How to write a slug in four steps

1. Start from the title or main keyword. What would someone type into a search box to find this page? That phrase is usually your best slug.
2. Cut filler words when they add nothing. Small words like the, a, for and in can often go. Keep them if removing them changes the meaning or makes the slug hard to read: how-to-make-a-budget reads better than how-make-budget.
3. Clean the characters. Lowercase everything, swap accented letters for plain ones, replace & with and, drop apostrophes and punctuation, and put a single hyphen between words.
4. Check it once, then leave it alone. Read it out loud. If a stranger would guess what the page is about, you are done.

The Slug Generator handles step three automatically and can do the first two for you as well: tick Remove common stop words to drop filler words, and set a Max length to trim long titles at a word boundary instead of chopping a word in half. You can paste many titles at once, one per line, which is handy when you are planning a batch of blog posts. If your titles themselves need tidying first, our guide to title case rules and the walkthrough on changing uppercase to lowercase will help.

Does the slug help SEO?

A little, but not in a magic way. The slug is one of the first things a person sees in a search result or a shared link, so a clear one can make them more willing to click. It also gives search engines a small, consistent hint about the topic. What it will not do is rescue a weak page. The content, the page title and the meta description carry far more weight, and stuffing extra keywords into the slug (best-cheap-budget-app-budget-planner-budget-free) just looks spammy.

VSH take: we treat slugs like file names on a shared drive. If a teammate could find the page from the address alone a year from now, the slug is good enough. Most people overthink the SEO part and underthink the "will this still make sense later" part.

Changing a slug after a page is live

Changing a published slug creates a brand new address. Anyone who bookmarked the old one, and every link pointing to it from other sites, will hit a "page not found" error unless you tell browsers where the page went. The fix is a permanent (301) redirect from the old URL to the new one. Google's documentation describes a permanent server-side redirect as the most reliable way to tell it that a page has moved for good.

Even with a redirect, only change slugs for a real reason, such as a typo, a misleading word or a big topic change. Changing slugs just to chase a new keyword usually costs more than it gains. If you write long guides, it is worth deciding the slug at the planning stage, along with roughly how long the page will be.

Quick checklist

• Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only
• Describes the page in a few real words
• No dates unless the page is tied to one moment
• No tracking tags or IDs in the slug itself
• Decided before publishing, and redirected with a 301 if it ever has to change

This guide is general information for website owners and bloggers. ViralScopeHub is an independent site and is not affiliated with Google, the IETF or any content management system mentioned here.