Free online tool
URL Slug Generator
Type or paste a title and get a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug.
What is a URL slug?
A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in a human-readable way. In example.com/blog/how-to-write-a-slug, the slug is how-to-write-a-slug. Clean slugs improve SEO because keywords in the URL are a small ranking signal and because readers are more likely to click and share a URL that clearly describes the content.
How this tool works
It normalizes accented characters, lowercases everything, replaces spaces and punctuation with single hyphens, and trims any leading or trailing hyphens. The result is a slug that will work in nearly any CMS.
Slug best practices
Keep slugs short (3–5 words is ideal), include your primary keyword, avoid stop words like "the" and "of" where possible, and never change a published slug without setting up a redirect — otherwise inbound links break.
+Are underscores OK instead of hyphens?
Google recommends hyphens. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators; underscores are treated as part of the word.
+Does it support non-Latin characters?
It strips diacritics from Latin letters (é → e). For scripts like Cyrillic or Chinese, you'll need transliteration first.
Turning messy titles into URLs worth linking to
A slug is the part of the URL after the domain, and search engines do use the words in it as a weak relevance signal, but the bigger payoff is human: a clean slug is what people paste into Slack, quote in a citation, or glance at in a list of search results.
This tool takes a raw headline or product name and converts it into a lowercase, hyphenated path that's short enough to read at a glance and stable enough to survive years of edits to the page's actual title.
Keep it short and drop the filler
Stop words like the, and, of, or a rarely help and just add length, so this tool strips them out along with punctuation and converts everything to lowercase with hyphens between words. Aim for three to six meaningful words; slugs that mirror the full headline word for word tend to look bloated and are more prone to becoming stale once the title changes.
Handling numbers, dates, and special characters
Version numbers, years, and prices generally survive the conversion fine, but currency symbols, ampersands, and slashes need explicit handling or they end up as stray hyphens or percent-encoded junk in the URL. A slug like 10-percent-off reads far better than 10--off or a raw encoded percent sign, so this tool spells out symbols rather than dropping or escaping them silently.
Changing a slug later has real cost
Once a URL is indexed and has earned backlinks or shares, changing its slug means you need a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one, or you lose accumulated link equity and risk a temporary ranking dip. Decide on the slug pattern early, especially for blog posts and product pages that are likely to be shared externally.
Slug patterns for different content types
Blog posts generally do best with a topic-based slug rather than a date-based one, since a post titled with a 2019 date in the URL looks stale even after you've updated the content in 2024. Product and category pages, on the other hand, benefit from a stable hierarchy, like /shoes/running/mens, that mirrors your site's navigation and stays meaningful even as individual product names change.
Duplicate slugs and how CMS platforms usually resolve them
Most content platforms append a numeric suffix, like -2 or -3, when two pieces of content would otherwise generate the identical slug, which quietly creates a URL that no longer matches the page title at a glance and looks accidental to anyone who notices it. Checking the generated slug against existing URLs before publishing, rather than after the CMS auto-appends a suffix, keeps the final path intentional instead of a side effect of publish order.
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