Slug Generator
Turn a title into a clean URL slug. Paste a whole list and get one slug per line.
What makes a slug good
A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies the page. The qualities that matter are short, readable, lower case, hyphen separated, and above all stable. A slug that changes breaks every link that already points at the page, every bookmark and every share, unless a redirect is set up at the same moment. That single property outweighs every optimisation you could make to the wording.
Three to five meaningful words is usually right. Longer slugs get truncated in search results and are harder to paste into a message without wrapping, and the extra words rarely earn their place.
Hyphens, not underscores
Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner. That makes red-shoes unambiguously two words, while red_shoes can be read as one token. Underscores and dots are offered here because some systems require them, not because either is a good default for a public page.
Accents and other scripts
Accented letters are transliterated to their closest ASCII form, so café becomes cafe and Müller becomes muller. This is deliberate. A URL may contain those characters percent-encoded, but the result is unreadable in a link, easy to corrupt when copied through a chat client, and inconsistent across systems. Characters with no reasonable Latin equivalent are dropped rather than escaped.
Stop words
Removing a, the, of and their neighbours shortens a slug, and that is the only reason to do it. Search engines stopped needing them stripped a long time ago. Keep them wherever dropping one changes the meaning, which happens more often than people expect: how-to-not-fail and how-to-fail are not the same page.
Examples
| Title | Slug |
|---|---|
| How to Migrate a WordPress Site | how-to-migrate-a-wordpress-site |
| How to Migrate a WordPress Site (stop words removed) | how-migrate-wordpress-site |
| Café Münchner Straße | cafe-munchner-strasse |
| C++ vs Rust: Which & Why? | c-vs-rust-which-why |
| Extra spaces and--dashes | extra-spaces-and-dashes |
How to use it
Type or paste a title and the slug appears underneath. Paste a whole list with one title per line and each line becomes its own slug, with the line breaks kept, which is the quick way to prepare a batch of URLs before creating the pages.
Max length trims the slug at the last whole word inside the limit rather than cutting mid-word, so the result still reads as words. Leave it empty for no limit.
Questions
What makes a good URL slug?
Short, readable, lower case, hyphen separated, and stable. Three to five meaningful words is usually plenty. The most important property is that it never changes, because changing a slug breaks every existing link to the page unless a redirect is put in place.
Should I remove stop words like a, the and of?
Usually yes, for brevity rather than for ranking. Search engines have not needed them stripped for a long time. Remove them where the slug still reads naturally, and keep them where dropping them would change the meaning, as in how-to-not-fail against how-to-fail.
What happens to accented and non-Latin letters?
They are transliterated into their closest ASCII form, so café becomes cafe and Müller becomes muller. Characters with no reasonable Latin equivalent are dropped rather than percent-encoded, since an encoded slug is unreadable in a link and easy to mangle when copied.
Hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so red_shoes can be read as one token while red-shoes is clearly two words. Underscores are offered here because some systems require them, not because they are a good default.
Is my text sent to a server?
No. The conversion runs inside your browser and this tool has no backend, so nothing you paste is transmitted, logged or stored.
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