URL Slug Generator
Free URL Slug Generator, turn any title into a clean, safe web address
Type a title and get a tidy, lowercase, URL-safe slug in real time: accented letters folded to plain ASCII, symbols and punctuation handled sensibly, spaces joined with hyphens, and an optional length cap that trims at a word boundary rather than mid-word. Preview the full URL, drop stop words to keep it keyword-focused, or paste a whole list of titles and slugify them all at once. It runs entirely in your browser; you sign in only to copy the result out.
- 100% free
- No sign-up
- Nothing uploaded
- Runs in your browser
The slug is the human-readable tail of a URL, the part after the last slash, and it does quiet, permanent work: it tells both readers and search engines what a page is about, it is what people see when they share the link, and once a page is published and indexed the slug is expensive to change without breaking inbound links. Which is exactly why getting it right the first time matters, and why doing it by hand goes wrong so often. A title copied straight into a URL brings its capital letters, which make the address case-sensitive and invite duplicate pages, its spaces, which become ugly %20 codes, and its accented or non-Latin characters, which turn into unreadable percent-encoded gibberish in the address bar. An ampersand or a slash in the title can break routing outright. And a long headline makes a long, unwieldy slug full of little words like a, the and of that add length without adding meaning. Fixing all of that per page is fiddly and easy to do inconsistently, so slugs across a site drift into a mess of styles. This tool does it the same correct way every time: it transliterates what it can, maps the awkward characters that will not simplify on their own, strips what is left, and joins the rest into a clean slug, with options to drop stop words and cap the length. The page is free and public; the only gated step is copying the slug out.
What it does, and why it's built this way
What makes a good slug
A good slug is short, lowercase, made of real words separated by hyphens, and free of anything that is not a letter, a number or that hyphen. Lowercase matters because URLs are case-sensitive on most servers, so About and about can become two different pages competing with each other. Hyphens matter because search engines read them as word separators while they read underscores as joiners, which is why the hyphen is the SEO convention and the default here. Keeping it short and keyword-focused matters because the slug is a small ranking and click signal and a big readability one: a clean two-to-five-word slug is easy to read aloud, to type and to trust, while a forty-character string of every word in the headline is none of those. This tool is built around those rules. It lowercases by default, joins with hyphens, and offers stop-word removal and a length cap so you can strip a slug down to the words that carry meaning rather than every word that happened to be in the title.
The hard part is the characters that do not simplify
Most slug tools are a single regex that lowercases the text and replaces anything non-alphanumeric with a hyphen, and that regex quietly mangles the real world. Feed it café and you get caf, because it threw the é away rather than turning it into e. Feed it a German straße and the ss it should become simply vanishes. Feed it R&D and, without care, the ampersand disappears and you get rd instead of r-and-d. This tool handles those cases deliberately. Accented Latin letters are transliterated to their base form, so café becomes cafe and Zürich becomes zurich. The handful of characters that have no decomposition, the German ss, the Scandinavian o-with-stroke, the ae and oe ligatures, are mapped to their conventional spellings by hand. Ampersands become the word and by default so R&D reads as r-and-d. Only after all of that does it strip what genuinely cannot be represented, so the slug you get is the readable one a careful human would have written, not the lossy one a lazy regex leaves behind.
One at a time, or a whole list at once
Single mode gives you a live slug as you type, a preview of the full URL against a domain you choose so you can see exactly how the link will read, and a set of plain-language warnings when something is worth a second look, such as a slug that has come out very long or still contains uppercase. Batch mode is for the moment you are naming a whole content plan at once: paste a list of titles, one per line, and get a clean slug for every one, ready to copy as a block into a spreadsheet or a CMS import. Everything runs in your browser, so the titles you are working on, which might be an unpublished editorial calendar, never leave your machine and are never stored. The page and its guidance are free and public. The only action that asks for a free account is copying the slugs out, the same soft sign-in used across the platform, which keeps a public tool from being scripted against at scale.
How to use it
- 1
Enter a title
In single mode, type or paste the page title, headline or product name. The slug builds live underneath, lowercased and hyphen-joined, with accents and symbols already handled so you can see the finished address as you type.
- 2
Tune the options
Choose a hyphen or underscore separator, toggle lowercasing, turn on stop-word removal to strip little words like a, the and of, decide whether an ampersand becomes the word and, and set a maximum length if you want the slug capped. Each change updates the slug immediately.
- 3
Preview the full URL
Enter your domain to see the complete link the slug will produce, so you can judge how it reads when shared. Watch for the advisory warnings, which flag a slug that is unusually long or has kept uppercase letters, before you commit to it.
- 4
Copy, or switch to batch
When the slug looks right, sign in once and copy it, or copy the whole URL. To slugify many titles at once, switch to batch mode, paste one title per line, and copy the full list of slugs as a block.
Common mistakes
Putting capital letters in a slug
On most servers URLs are case-sensitive, so /About and /about are two different addresses, which splits links and confuses search engines about which is the real page. Keep lowercasing on, which is the default here, so every slug is consistently lowercase and there is no chance of an accidental duplicate created by a stray capital.
Using underscores as word separators
Search engines treat a hyphen as a space between words but read an underscore as joining them, so my_great_post can be seen as one long token rather than three words. Use the hyphen separator, the default, unless a specific system requires underscores, so the words in your slug are read as the separate keywords they are.
Letting accented characters percent-encode
Pasting café or naïve straight into a URL leaves accented letters that browsers show as unreadable %-codes when the link is copied. This tool transliterates them to plain ASCII, so café becomes cafe, giving you a clean address that stays readable wherever it is shared rather than a string of percent signs.
Changing a slug after the page is indexed
Once a page is published and has inbound links, changing its slug breaks those links and loses the ranking it earned unless you set up a redirect. Get the slug right before publishing by using this tool up front, and if you must change one later, always add a redirect from the old slug to the new one rather than simply renaming the page.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a URL slug?
- The slug is the readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page, the segment after the final slash, for example blog-post-title in example.com/blog/blog-post-title. It is written for both people and search engines: a clear slug tells a reader what the page is before they click and gives search engines a keyword signal. Because links and rankings attach to it, the slug is meant to be set once, up front, and kept stable.
- Should I use hyphens or underscores?
- Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a separator between words but read an underscore as joining them into one, so best-coffee-shops is understood as three words while best_coffee_shops can be read as a single token. The hyphen is the long-standing SEO convention and the default in this tool. Underscores are offered only for systems that specifically require them; for public web pages, choose hyphens.
- Does it handle accents and other languages?
- Yes. Accented Latin letters are transliterated to their base form, so café becomes cafe and Zürich becomes zurich, and a set of characters that do not decompose on their own, such as the German ss, the Scandinavian o-with-stroke and the ae and oe ligatures, are mapped to their conventional ASCII spellings. Characters from scripts with no ASCII equivalent are removed so the slug stays a clean, universally safe web address.
- What do stop words do, and should I remove them?
- Stop words are the small connective words like a, the, of, and and to that carry little meaning on their own. Removing them shortens the slug and raises its keyword density, so how-to-bake-the-best-sourdough-bread can become bake-best-sourdough-bread. It is optional and off by default because sometimes those words aid readability. Turn it on when you want a tight, keyword-focused slug and the removed words are not needed to make sense of it.
- Can I generate many slugs at once?
- Yes. Switch to batch mode, paste a list of titles with one per line, and the tool produces a clean slug for each using the same options. That is useful when you are planning a batch of content or preparing a CMS import and want consistent slugs across all of it. You can copy the whole list of slugs as a block to paste into a spreadsheet or import file.
- Is the tool free and private?
- Yes to both. The generator and all of its guidance are free, and it runs entirely in your browser, so the titles you enter, which may be an unpublished content plan, are never sent to a server or stored against your account. A free account is required only to copy slugs out, which keeps the public tool from being scripted against at scale. Generating and previewing slugs on screen needs no account at all.
Need this done properly, at scale?
The tool handles the one-off. When it's a system you're building, that's the paid version of the job, and we do that too.
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