URL Slug Generator

About the URL Slug Generator

This URL slug generator converts a page title into the lowercase, hyphenated fragment that belongs at the end of a web address. Accents are stripped down to their base letters, apostrophes are dropped rather than replaced with a gap, every other punctuation mark becomes a word boundary, and the words are rejoined with your chosen separator. You can optionally remove common stop words and cap the slug at a maximum length, in which case it is truncated on a word boundary rather than mid-word. A sample URL and a character count are shown alongside the slug.

How to use the URL Slug Generator

1. 1

   Type or paste your headline into the 'Title' field.

2. 2

   Choose a 'Word separator' — hyphen is recommended, underscore is available if your platform requires it.

3. 3

   Leave 'Lowercase' ticked unless your site deliberately uses mixed-case URLs.

4. 4

   Optionally tick 'Remove common stop words' and set a 'Max length' to trim long titles; 0 means no limit.

5. 5

   Copy the slug, or copy the full example URL shown beneath it.

What people use it for

How accents and punctuation are handled

The first step is Unicode normalisation to NFD, the decomposed form, which separates a letter from any accent applied to it — e-acute becomes a plain e followed by a combining acute mark. The combining marks are then deleted, leaving the base ASCII letters behind, which is how cafe-latte comes out of an accented original rather than percent-encoded gibberish. Apostrophes, both the straight and the curly kind, are deleted rather than converted to a separator, because 'don't' should slugify to dont and not to don-t. Everything else that is not a letter or a digit — punctuation, symbols, currency signs, emoji — collapses into a word boundary, so multiple marks in a row do not produce a run of empty hyphens. The transliteration is deliberately conservative and only covers scripts that decompose to Latin. Text in Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew or CJK has no ASCII base form to fall back on and will be stripped entirely; the tool tells you when a title contains nothing usable rather than silently returning an empty slug. If you publish in those languages, modern browsers and Google handle percent-encoded Unicode URLs perfectly well, so use the URL Encoder instead of slugifying.

What makes a slug good for search

Google has said for years that URL words are a very minor ranking factor, so the case for a clean slug rests mainly on the things that follow from it: the URL appears in the search result, in shared links and in the browser bar, and a readable one earns clicks and links that a string of query parameters does not. Hyphens are the right separator because Google treats a hyphen as a word break and has historically treated an underscore as a word joiner, meaning best_running_shoes may be read as one token. Keep slugs short; three to five meaningful words is a good target, and the length cap here truncates on a separator so you never end up with a half word. Removing stop words shortens the URL and is safe when the slug still reads sensibly, but strip them carelessly and you get to-be-or-not-to-be reduced to nothing, which is why the tool keeps the original words if filtering would empty the slug. Most importantly, decide the slug before you publish. Changing it later means a 301 redirect and the loss of any direct links that were never updated.