Open any article and look at the address bar. After the domain name comes a tail like /blog/what-is-a-url-slug. That tail is the slug — the human-readable name of the page, built into its address forever.
Why the slug matters
Three audiences read your slug. People read it in search results, chats and emails, and a clear slug earns clicks because it promises exactly the page they want. Search engines read it as one more signal of what the page is about — a small signal, but free. And future you reads it in analytics and file lists, grateful that the page explains itself.
The five rules of a good slug
- Lowercase only. Capitals in addresses cause duplicate-page confusion on many servers. "Clean-Text" and "clean-text" should never both exist — lowercase removes the question.
- Hyphens between words. Search engines read hyphens as spaces; underscores and joined words read as one blob.
- Keywords in, filler out. "how-to-remove-duplicate-lines" is a slug. "how-to-remove-the-duplicate-lines-from-a-list-quickly-and-easily" is a paragraph wearing a slug costume — drop "the", "a", and anything that adds length without meaning.
- Short enough to share. If the address looks embarrassing pasted into a message, it is too long. Three to five strong words is the usual sweet spot.
- No dates, no version numbers. A slug with "2024" in it makes a still-good page look expired. Evergreen slugs survive updates.
Good slug, bad slug
- Title: "10 Best Ways to Clean Your Text (2026 Guide!)" → best-ways-to-clean-text (not: 10-best-ways-to-clean-your-text-2026-guide — the year will betray it, and the title itself can carry the number)
- "What Is a URL Slug?" → what-is-a-url-slug (this very page practises what it preaches)
- "My Trip to Lahore — Day 3!!" → lahore-trip-day-3 (not: my-trip-to-lahore-day-3 — "my" adds nothing a stranger can search for)
The 10-second method
Take the finished title, paste it into the free Slug Generator, and then delete any word you would not search for. The tool handles the mechanics — lowercase, hyphens, accents and punctuation cleaned — and your judgement handles the editing.
One warning before you change old slugs
A slug is an address: change it and the old address stops working unless you set up a redirect from the old slug to the new one. Fix slugs freely on new pages; on established pages, only change one when the improvement is worth setting up that redirect properly.
The bottom line
A slug takes ten seconds to write and lives as long as the page. Lowercase, hyphens, keywords without filler, short, and no dates — write it with the generator, check it like a reader, and move on to the writing that actually fills the page.