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How to Create URL-Friendly Slugs for Blog Posts (The Right Way)

2026-04-16 · 8 min read

TL;DR: A good blog post slug is lowercase, hyphenated, and contains your target keyword — keep it under 60 characters and skip filler words like "a", "the", and "is".

Table of Contents

What is a URL Slug?

A URL slug is the last part of a web address — the human-readable section that identifies a specific page. In the URL https://example.com/blog/how-to-write-better-headlines, the slug is how-to-write-better-headlines.

Slugs sit between your domain and the reader. They appear in browser address bars, search engine results, social media previews, and shared links. A clean, descriptive slug tells both Google and your audience exactly what the page is about before they even click.

Most blogging platforms (WordPress, Ghost, Webflow, Notion sites) auto-generate a slug from your post title. The problem is that auto-generated slugs are rarely optimized. They often include stop words, special characters, timestamps, or post IDs that add noise without adding value.

Writing slugs intentionally — rather than accepting the default — is one of the easiest, highest-leverage SEO habits you can develop.

Why Slugs Matter for SEO

Search engines use the URL as a ranking signal. While it is not the strongest signal, it reinforces the relevance of a page for a target keyword when used correctly. Here is why slugs matter in practice:

Keyword relevance. Google reads the words in your URL. A slug that matches the searcher's query adds a small but real relevance boost. If someone searches "url friendly slugs for blog posts" and your URL contains those exact words, you signal topical alignment.

Click-through rate. URLs appear as the green or grey breadcrumb text in Google's search results. A readable, descriptive slug like /how-to-create-url-friendly-slugs is more trustworthy and clickable than a messy alternative like /p=4821 or /blog/2026/04/16/post-title-with-lots-of-words-and-stop-words.

Link sharing. When people share a URL in Slack, email, or on social media without an anchor text, the raw URL is what readers see. A clean slug communicates the content instantly.

Canonical hygiene. A consistent, permanent slug prevents duplicate content issues. Changing slugs after a post is published causes broken links, lost backlinks, and ranking drops — so getting it right the first time matters.

Rules for Writing a Good Slug

Follow these rules every time you publish a new post:

1. Use lowercase letters only

URLs are technically case-sensitive on many servers. /My-Post and /my-post can resolve to different pages. Always use lowercase to avoid confusion and duplicate content risks.

2. Replace spaces with hyphens

Spaces in URLs become %20, which looks broken and is hard to read. Hyphens (-) are the standard separator. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators, which helps with keyword recognition. Avoid underscores (_) — Google historically treated them as word joiners, not separators.

3. Remove stop words

Words like "a", "an", "the", "and", "is", "to", "for", and "in" rarely add keyword value to a slug. Stripping them keeps the slug short and focused. The title "How to Write a Blog Post That Ranks" becomes the slug write-blog-post-that-ranks.

4. Include your target keyword

Put your primary keyword as close to the start of the slug as possible. /url-friendly-slugs-blog-posts is better than /blog-post-tips-url-slugs-guide.

5. Keep it under 60 characters

Shorter slugs are easier to share, read, and remember. They also display more cleanly in search results. If your slug is longer than 60 characters, cut it down.

6. Avoid dates unless they are essential

Dates like /2026/04/how-to-write-slugs make your content feel outdated fast. Evergreen content performs better with timeless slugs.

7. Skip special characters

Avoid punctuation, apostrophes, commas, colons, and slashes in slugs. These characters either break URLs or require encoding that creates messy strings.

How to Convert a Title into a Slug

Converting a blog title into a slug manually is tedious and error-prone. The fastest approach is to use a dedicated tool.

The Slug Generator at JustTextTool.com handles the full conversion in one click: it lowercases everything, replaces spaces with hyphens, strips special characters, and removes common stop words. Paste your title in, get a clean slug out.

The manual process, if you ever need it, works like this:

  1. Start with your post title: How to Write a URL-Friendly Blog Post Slug (Complete Guide)
  2. Lowercase everything: how to write a url-friendly blog post slug (complete guide)
  3. Remove punctuation and special characters: how to write a url friendly blog post slug complete guide
  4. Remove stop words: write url friendly blog post slug complete guide
  5. Replace spaces with hyphens: write-url-friendly-blog-post-slug-complete-guide
  6. Trim to under 60 characters: write-url-friendly-blog-post-slug

That final result is clean, keyword-rich, and readable.

If you need to check your target keyword length or compare slug options, the Word Counter can help you measure character counts quickly. And if your slug source text has inconsistent capitalization — common when copying from notes or documents — the Lowercase Converter normalizes everything in one step before you finalize the slug.

Common Slug Mistakes to Avoid

Even experienced bloggers make these mistakes:

Using the full title as-is. Auto-generated slugs from WordPress or other CMS platforms often include every word from the title, including stop words and punctuation. Always review and edit the default slug before publishing.

Including session IDs or query strings. URLs like /post?id=12345&ref=homepage expose your backend structure, are unfriendly to crawlers, and break when parameters change. Use pretty permalinks.

Using underscores instead of hyphens. This was a significant SEO issue for years. While Google has improved its handling of underscores, hyphens remain the safe, recommended choice.

Duplicate slugs. Two posts with the same or very similar slugs cause canonical confusion. Before publishing, search your CMS for any existing posts that might share your chosen slug.

Changing slugs after ranking. Once a post ranks, its URL is indexed, linked, and bookmarked. Changing the slug breaks all of that. If you must change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one immediately.

Keyword stuffing in slugs. Repeating the same word twice (/how-to-write-slugs-best-slug-writing) looks spammy to both readers and search engines. One clean keyword phrase is enough.

When to Change an Existing Slug

Sometimes changing a slug is the right call, even with the SEO risks. Consider it when:

In these cases, always:

  1. Set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one
  2. Update all internal links pointing to the old URL
  3. If the post has backlinks, reach out to the linking sites to request an update

FAQ

Does changing my slug hurt my rankings? Yes, temporarily. Even with a 301 redirect, Google needs time to re-crawl and re-index the new URL. Expect a brief traffic dip. This is why getting slugs right at publication time is so important.

Should I include the year in my slug? Only if the year is critical to the content's value — like a yearly roundup ("best-tools-2026"). For evergreen how-to posts, skip the date entirely.

How long should a slug be? Aim for 3–6 words. Under 60 characters is the practical rule. Shorter is usually better as long as the keyword is present.

What about non-English characters like accents or kanji? These get percent-encoded in URLs, which creates long, unreadable strings. For non-English content, consider transliteration (converting to the closest ASCII equivalent) or using short, clean slugs in the local language that your CMS handles gracefully.

Can two different posts have the same slug? No — slugs must be unique within a domain. If you try to publish two posts at /how-to-write-better, one will overwrite or conflict with the other depending on your CMS.

Quick Checklist

Before you hit publish, run through this slug checklist:

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JustTextTool is a text utility project focused on clean formatting, developer workflows, and practical writing improvements.