Question 1

What is a URL slug?

Accepted Answer

A URL slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in human-readable form. For example, in 'https://example.com/blog/my-blog-post-title', the slug is 'my-blog-post-title'. Good slugs are short, descriptive, and contain the page's primary keyword.

Question 2

Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?

Accepted Answer

Google recommends using hyphens (-) rather than underscores (_) in URLs. Google treats hyphens as word separators, so 'my-blog-post' is read as three separate words: 'my', 'blog', and 'post'. Underscores are treated as word joiners, so 'my_blog_post' is read as one word.

Question 3

How long should a URL slug be?

Accepted Answer

Keep slugs short and meaningful — ideally 3–5 words. Shorter slugs are easier to remember, share, and display in browser tabs. Google does not impose a strict URL length limit, but research suggests shorter URLs tend to rank better and have higher click-through rates.

Question 4

Should a URL slug be lowercase?

Accepted Answer

Yes. URL slugs should always be lowercase because URLs are case-sensitive on most servers. 'example.com/My-Post' and 'example.com/my-post' can be treated as different pages, creating duplicate content issues. Always use lowercase in slugs.

Question 5

What characters are not allowed in a URL?

Accepted Answer

URL slugs should only contain letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), and hyphens (-) or underscores (_). Spaces, special characters (#, %, &, @, etc.), punctuation, and non-ASCII characters (including accented letters) should be removed or encoded. This tool handles all of that automatically.

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