URL slug

A URL slug is the human-readable text at the end of a website’s URL that identifies a specific page in a clean and meaningful way.

It usually contains keywords that describe the page content, making the link easier for both users and search engines to understand.

A well-crafted slug improves SEO by helping search engines recognize what the page is about and increasing the chances of appearing in relevant search results. Good practice for creating slugs includes using lowercase letters, separating words with hyphens, removing stop words (like “and,” “the,” “of”), and keeping the text short but descriptive.

For example, a long title like “10 Tips to Improve Your Website Speed and Performance in 2025” can be turned into a clean slug such as improve-website-speed-performance-2025.

By using clear and optimized slugs, website owners can enhance user experience, increase click-through rates, and maintain consistent URL structure across their site.

URL Slug — Best Practices & Separator Guide

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page, appearing after the domain name. Well-formed slugs make links easy to read, share, and understand — both for users and search engines. This article explains what slugs are, why they matter, recommended formatting, and a focused look at separators (hyphen, underscore, etc.) with examples and short code snippets.

Why slugs matter

• Usability: Clean slugs are easier to read and remember (e.g., example.com/best-phone-2025).
• SEO: Search engines use words in the slug to help determine page relevance. Good slugs can improve click-through rates.
• Sharing & analytics: Descriptive slugs make UTM-less sharing more meaningful and easier to analyze in logs.

Best practices

1. Use lowercase letters only. (Avoid case-sensitive confusion.)
2. Separate words with hyphens (-). They are the recommended separator for SEO.
3. Keep slugs short but descriptive — ideally under 3–6 words for clarity.
4. Remove or minimize stop words (like "and", "the", "of") unless they are essential for meaning.
5. Strip or normalize diacritics and special characters (e.g., "café" → "cafe").
6. Avoid spaces, punctuation, and reserved characters (like # ? & % /) that require encoding.
7. Maintain consistent structure across your site for predictability and better UX.

Separators — which to use?

The separator is the character used to split words inside a slug. Here's a short comparison of the commonly considered separators.

Separator	Example	SEO / Usability	Notes
Hyphen (-)	best-phone-2025	Recommended — search engines treat hyphens as word separators.	Standard on the web; use for most cases.
Underscore (_)	best_phone_2025	Not recommended — search engines historically treat underscore as part of a word.	Readable to humans but worse for SEO than hyphen.
Plus (+)	best+phone+2025	Poor — often used in query strings; may be confusing.	Often encoded and not ideal for canonical paths.
Period (.)	best.phone.2025	Okay for short uses but can confuse content negotiation or file extension parsing.	Avoid if your server interprets extensions.
Nothing / CamelCase	BestPhone2025	Poor — case-sensitivity and readability issues.	Avoid; use hyphens instead.

Examples

Further tips

• Canonicalization: if the same content is reachable via multiple slugs, use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Uniqueness: ensure slugs are unique (append an ID or date if necessary) — avoid auto-generating identical slugs for different pages.
• Human review: for important pages (articles, product pages), allow a human-friendly edit of the generated slug before publishing.
• Redirects: if you change an important slug, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one to preserve SEO value and bookmarks.

Conclusion

URL slugs are a small but important part of website architecture. Simple rules — use lowercase, keep them short, and most importantly, separate words with hyphens (-) — will make your site easier to use and better understood by search engines. For developer usage, always sanitize input, normalize characters, and add logic to maintain uniqueness and redirects when slugs change.