URL Slug Generator

A URL slug is the human-readable portion of a URL identifying a specific page, like 'how-to-use-git' in example.com/blog/how-to-use-git. Slugs matter for SEO because search engines use them to understand page content. A descriptive slug with relevant keywords helps rankings. Best practices: use lowercase, separate words with hyphens, keep it to 3-5 words, remove stop words, and avoid special characters. Clean slugs also improve link sharing and user trust.

Unicode characters are typically transliterated to ASCII equivalents. Accented characters like e-acute become 'e', German umlauts like u-umlaut become 'ue'. CJK characters can use romanization systems. DevBolt handles transliteration automatically for common character sets. ASCII-only slugs ensure maximum compatibility across all systems, email clients, and social media platforms where URLs might be shared or truncated.

Use hyphens (-). Google treats hyphens as word separators, so 'web-development' is indexed as two separate words. Underscores are treated as joiners, so 'web_development' is indexed as one compound word, reducing search relevance. This distinction was confirmed by Google and remains the standard recommendation. Most CMS platforms and URL slug libraries default to hyphens for this reason.