A good slug is short (3-5 words), lowercase, uses hyphens (not underscores) between words, includes the target keyword, and omits stop words like 'the', 'a', and 'of'. For example, 'how-to-bake-bread' beats 'how-to-bake-the-perfect-loaf-of-bread-at-home'.

Always hyphens. Google treats hyphens as word separators but reads underscores as joiners — so 'bake_bread' is read as the single word 'bakebread', while 'bake-bread' is correctly read as two words. This is a longstanding, officially confirmed Google behavior.

Usually no. Removing stop words (the, and, of, to, a, in) makes slugs shorter and keyword-focused without hurting readability. The exception is when removing them changes meaning or readability badly — e.g. 'flights-to-paris' reads better than 'flights-paris'. This tool offers a toggle.

Aim for under 60 characters and 3-5 words. Shorter slugs are easier to read, share, and click. Google truncates long URLs in search results, and overly long slugs can look spammy. Front-load the most important keyword.

You can, but you must set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. Changing a slug without redirecting breaks every existing link and loses accumulated ranking signals. If a page is performing well, think hard before changing its slug.

No — the slug should be a condensed, keyword-focused version. Your title can be 'The 10 Best Espresso Machines for Home Baristas in 2026' while the slug is simply 'best-espresso-machines'. The slug captures intent; the title sells the click.

Accented letters, ampersands, spaces, and symbols get percent-encoded into ugly strings like %20 or %C3%A9, which look broken when shared. This tool transliterates accented characters (é → e) and strips symbols so your slug stays clean and human-readable.