What Is a URL Slug and How to Create a Good One

A URL slug is the readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page, and a good one is deliberately boring: lowercase, hyphen-separated, and free of anything that would need What Is URL Encoding? to display safely.

What Is a URL Slug?

A slug is the human-readable portion of a URL that typically follows the domain, often derived from a page’s title, used to identify that specific page in a clean, predictable format.

What Makes a Good Slug

• Lowercase and hyphen-separated (kebab-case). This avoids case-sensitivity ambiguity and keeps the URL easy to read and type.
• Free of special characters. Spaces, punctuation, and symbols either get percent-encoded into an ugly-looking URL or aren’t allowed at all, a clean slug avoids needing that encoding in the first place.
• Short but descriptive. A slug should give a reader a reasonable idea of the page’s content at a glance, without being unnecessarily long.

Worked Example

Common Mistakes

• Leaving spaces or special characters in a slug. These either become percent-encoded (producing an ugly URL) or cause errors, depending on the system.
• Using mixed case in a slug. This reintroduces case-sensitivity questions a clean, all-lowercase slug avoids entirely.
• Making a slug excessively long. A slug that repeats the entire page title word for word is often unnecessarily long; a shorter, still-descriptive version usually works better.

Use the Slug Generator

The Slug Generator converts any title or heading into a clean, URL-friendly slug instantly.