- What is a URL slug?
- A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page. For example, in "https://example.com/blog/how-to-bake-bread", the slug is "how-to-bake-bread". Slugs are lowercase, use hyphens instead of spaces, and contain only URL-safe characters.
- How does the slug converter clean the text?
- The converter lowercases all text, removes diacritics and accents (é → e), strips special characters and punctuation, replaces spaces and consecutive hyphens with a single separator (hyphen by default), and trims leading/trailing separators.
- Should I use hyphens or underscores in URL slugs?
- Google recommends hyphens over underscores for word separators in URLs. Google treats hyphens as word separators (so "blue-widget" is indexed as two words: "blue" and "widget"), but treats underscores as connecting characters (so "blue_widget" is one word). Use hyphens for best SEO.
- What is the maximum length for a URL slug?
- While there is no hard technical limit, best practice is to keep slugs under 60 characters (about 3–5 words). Shorter slugs are easier to read, share, and remember. Google recommends removing stop words (a, the, in, of) from slugs for cleaner URLs.
- Why are special characters removed from slugs?
- Special characters (&, %, #, ?, /) have special meanings in URLs and can cause routing errors or ambiguous parsing if used literally. Percent-encoding them (e.g. %26 for &) makes URLs ugly and hard to read. Slugs are designed to use only safe characters: a–z, 0–9, and hyphens.
- Does the converter handle non-English characters?
- Yes. Accented and diacritic characters are transliterated to their ASCII equivalents (é → e, ñ → n, ü → u) using Unicode normalization. Characters outside the Latin alphabet (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic) are removed; consider transliterating them manually first for best results.
- Do CMS platforms use slugs automatically?
- Most CMS platforms including WordPress, Shopify, Ghost, and Webflow auto-generate slugs from page or post titles. This tool is useful when you want to preview and refine the slug before publishing, or when working with platforms that don't auto-generate slugs.