Text & Writing

URL Slug Generator

Turn any headline into a clean, accent-free, SEO-safe URL slug.

What it does. A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address after the domain. This generator converts a title into a valid slug: it lowercases, strips accents, transliterates non-Latin scripts, replaces spaces with hyphens, and removes punctuation. It can also drop stop words and cap the length.

Runs in your browserNothing uploadsNo signupWorks offline

How to use URL Slug Generator

Type or paste your page title or headline.
Choose the separator, and decide whether to drop stop words and cap the length.
Copy the generated slug straight into your CMS permalink field.

What makes a good URL slug?

Short, lowercase, hyphenated, and descriptive of the page. Google has stated that words in a URL are a very light ranking signal, but slugs matter more for the things around ranking: click-through rate from results, how a link reads when shared in Slack or a message, and how it survives being copied into a document.

Use hyphens, not underscores. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so image_compressor reads as one token.
Lowercase everything. Paths are case-sensitive on Linux servers, so /About and /about are two different URLs — and two chances to split link equity or serve a 404.
Three to five words is the sweet spot. Long enough to describe the page, short enough to survive truncation in a search result.
Drop the date unless the page is genuinely time-bound. Dated URLs make evergreen content look stale and make republishing awkward.
Never change a live slug without a 301 redirect. A changed slug is a new URL, and the old one’s rankings do not follow it automatically.

How are accents and non-Latin characters handled?

Accented Latin characters are decomposed with Unicode NFD normalization, which separates a base letter from its combining diacritic, and the diacritics are then stripped. So café becomes cafe, Zürich becomes zurich, and São Paulo becomes sao-paulo.

German is special-cased because NFD gets it wrong for readers: ä, ö and ü conventionally expand to ae, oe and ue in German URLs, and ß expands to ss.

Cyrillic and Greek go through explicit transliteration tables rather than being stripped, because there is no base Latin letter to fall back to. Москва becomes moskva, Ελλάδα becomes ellada.

Should I remove stop words from slugs?

Usually yes, but not always. Stop words — a, the, of, in, on, and, for — carry no search value and consume characters.

"The Complete Guide to Compressing Images for the Web" becomes complete-guide-compressing-images-web, which is 38 characters instead of 58 and reads no worse.

The exception is when removing them changes the meaning or makes the slug unreadable. "How to Get Out of a Lease" reduced to how-get-out-lease is fine; "The Who" reduced to who is not. Review the output rather than accepting it blindly — this tool shows both versions.

What characters are actually legal in a URL?

RFC 3986 allows unreserved characters — A–Z, a–z, 0–9, hyphen, period, underscore and tilde — anywhere in a path without encoding. Everything else must be percent-encoded.

Modern browsers will display percent-encoded UTF-8 as readable Unicode, so /café can work and will show correctly in the address bar. But the underlying URL is /caf%C3%A9, and that is what appears when someone copies the link into an email, a spreadsheet, or an analytics report.

The practical rule: restrict slugs to lowercase ASCII letters, digits and hyphens. It is the only set that survives every CMS, CDN, analytics tool, email client and messaging app without transformation.

What characters are actually legal in a URL?
Character	Legal unencoded	Recommended in slugs
a-z 0-9	Yes	Yes
A-Z	Yes	No — case-sensitivity risk
- (hyphen)	Yes	Yes — the word separator
_ (underscore)	Yes	No — joins words for Google
. ~	Yes	Avoid — extension ambiguity
Space	No	Never — encodes to %20
& ? # %	No	Never — reserved delimiters
Emoji	No	No — encodes to unreadable bytes

How long should a slug be?

Under 60 characters for the slug itself, and under about 75 for the full visible URL in a search result before truncation.

A 2016 Backlinko analysis of a million search results found shorter URLs correlated with higher rankings, though correlation here almost certainly reflects that well-optimized sites also write short URLs rather than a direct causal effect.

The concrete reason to keep them short is truncation. Google shows roughly the first 60–75 characters of a URL in a desktop result and fewer on mobile. A slug that gets cut mid-word looks careless in exactly the moment someone is deciding whether to click.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Google explicitly treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners, so my_page_title is read as one long token while my-page-title is read as three words.

Can I change a slug after publishing?

You can, but set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one at the same time. Without it, existing links break and the accumulated ranking signals do not transfer.

Do slugs affect SEO?

Mildly and indirectly. Google has described URL words as a very small ranking factor. The larger effects are on click-through rate from results and on how shareable the link looks.

Should the slug match the page title exactly?

It should match the intent, not the words. Titles get rewritten for click-through; slugs should stay stable. Keep the primary keyword and drop the rest.

How do I handle non-English titles?

Use the transliteration output for Cyrillic, Greek and accented Latin. For Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Hindi, most sites either use a hand-written English slug or accept percent-encoded UTF-8 — both work, but the English slug is far more shareable.

Should I include the date in a slug?

Only for genuinely time-bound content such as news. Evergreen pages with dated URLs look stale in results and become awkward to update without a redirect.

Is there a numbers-and-hyphens limit?

No technical limit, but two consecutive hyphens and leading or trailing hyphens are collapsed automatically because they read as typos and some CMSs reject them.

Guides for URL Slug Generator

What Makes a Good URL Slug6 min read