What is a URL slug?
A slug is the readable last part of a web address that identifies a page, for example the better-sleep-tips in example.com/blog/better-sleep-tips. A good slug tells people and search engines what the page is about before it loads. This generator converts any title into a safe slug: it lowercases everything, strips accents, replaces spaces and punctuation with a separator and removes characters that can cause problems in links.
How the conversion works
- Lowercase: web servers can treat upper and lower case paths as different pages, so lowercase avoids accidental duplicates.
- Accents removed: "Café" becomes "cafe" and "Ünïcode" becomes "unicode". Letters such as ß, æ, ø and ł are transliterated to ss, ae, o and l.
- Ampersands become "and": "Fish & Chips" turns into "fish-and-chips".
- Apostrophes dropped: "It's" becomes "its" rather than "it-s".
- Everything else becomes a separator: runs of spaces, punctuation and symbols collapse into a single hyphen or underscore, and nothing is left at the start or end.
Slug best practices
- Keep it short and descriptive. Include the main keyword or topic, but do not stuff keywords. Three to six words is a good target.
- Use hyphens, not underscores. Search engines such as Google recommend hyphens as word separators in URLs, because underscores can be treated as joining words together. The underscore option is here for file names and systems that require it.
- Drop filler words when it helps. The stop-word option removes words such as "the", "of" and "and". Use it for long titles, but keep them if removing them would change the meaning.
- Do not include dates unless they matter. A slug that never goes out of date is easier to keep if you update the content later.
- Keep slugs stable. Changing a published slug breaks incoming links unless you add a redirect, so settle on the slug before you publish.
Length limits
There is no strict limit, but long addresses are truncated in search results and are awkward to share. The maximum length option shortens a slug at a word boundary, so you never get a half-cut word. If the first word alone is longer than the limit, it is cut at the limit.
Limitations
This tool produces ASCII slugs made of letters a–z and digits. Text in scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic or Greek has no Latin equivalent here and is dropped, so for those languages you may prefer to write a slug by hand or use a system that supports Unicode URLs. The conversion runs in your browser, and what you type is not stored or sent anywhere.