Free slug generator

A URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page in a human-readable way. It's everything after the domain name (and often after a folder like /blog/ or /products/) that describes what the page is about. For example, in the URL https://example.com/blog/best-running-shoes-2026, the slug is best-running-shoes-2026.

Slugs exist because raw page titles don't make good URLs. A title like “10 Best Running Shoes for Beginners in 2026!” has capital letters, punctuation, and spaces — all things that either break URLs outright or get ugly-encoded into %20 and similar escape sequences. A slugify function (exactly what this tool does) strips all of that down to something clean: lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. The result reads well, copies cleanly into a chat message, and is far less likely to break when pasted into an email, a spreadsheet, or a CMS field.

Slugs matter for more than just tidiness. Search engines use the words in a URL as a (small but real) ranking signal, and — more importantly — people use them too. When someone hovers over a link or glances at a URL in a list of search results, a slug like /blog/how-to-choose-running-shoes tells them exactly what they're about to click. A slug like /blog/post-id-483920 tells them nothing.

Under the hood, generating a slug from a title is a short pipeline of text transformations. This tool runs all of them client-side, live as you type:

1. Transliterate accented characters. Letters like é, ñ, ü, and ß are converted to their closest plain-ASCII equivalent (é → e, ñ → n) using Unicode normalization, with special handling for German umlauts (ä → ae, ö → oe, ü → ue, ß → ss) since a simple accent-strip would otherwise turn them into a, o, and u — which changes the pronunciation and meaning of the word.
2. Lowercase everything. Mixed-case URLs are technically valid but functionally risky — some servers treat /About and /about as different pages, which can create duplicate-content issues. Lowercase is the universal convention.
3. Expand the ampersand. “&” carries real meaning (“Salt & Pepper” is not the same as “Salt Pepper”), so it's spelled out as “and” rather than silently dropped.
4. Strip emoji, symbols, and punctuation. Anything that isn't a letter, number, space, or hyphen — emoji, quotation marks, exclamation points, bullets, currency symbols — is removed entirely.
5. Remove stopwords (optional). Common filler words (a, the, and, of, to, in, for, on, with, and similar) can be dropped to shorten the slug without losing meaning.
6. Join with a separator. Remaining words are joined with hyphens (the SEO-recommended default) or underscores, and any doubled-up separators are collapsed into one.
7. Truncate at a word boundary (optional). If a max length is set, the slug is cut to fit — but always at the last complete word, never mid-word.

A slug is a small piece of a page, but it's one that both search engines and humans read directly. A few rules consistently show up in SEO guidance from Google and from experienced practitioners:

• Keep it short. Aim for 3–6 words. Long slugs get truncated in search results and are harder to remember, share, and type. If your title is a full sentence, cut it down to the core keyword phrase rather than slugifying every word.
• Use hyphens, not underscores. Google explicitly treats hyphens as word separators but does not reliably treat underscores the same way — running-shoes is read as two words, while running_shoes risks being read as one token. Hyphens are the industry standard.
• Always use lowercase. Consistent lowercase avoids duplicate-URL issues on case-sensitive servers and matches what every major CMS and SEO tool expects.
• Remove stopwords when they don't add meaning. Words like “a,” “the,” and “of” rarely help a reader or a search engine understand the page, and removing them shortens the URL. That said, don't remove a stopword if doing so changes the meaning — “how-to-not-fail” and “how-to-fail” are very different pages.
• Include your target keyword, once. Put the phrase people are actually searching for in the slug — but only once. Repeating it (“shoes-running-shoes-buy-running-shoes”) reads as spam to both readers and search engines.
• Avoid dates and numbers that will go stale, unless the content itself is dated (like a “2026 guide”). A slug like /best-shoes-2023 quietly signals “outdated content” to anyone who notices the year.
• Never use special characters, spaces, or non-ASCII letters in the final slug. They get percent-encoded by browsers (a space becomes %20), which turns a clean URL into an ugly, hard-to-read one when pasted anywhere outside a browser address bar.
• Make slugs stable. Once a page is published and indexed, changing its slug breaks existing links and requires a 301 redirect to preserve SEO value. Get it right before you publish.

Notice the pattern: bad slugs either keep raw punctuation and spaces (forcing the browser to percent-encode them into unreadable %XX sequences) or use an internal ID that means nothing to a human reader. Good slugs are short, readable, keyword-focused, and use hyphens throughout.

A URL's slug shows up in more places than people usually realize — in Google's search results (displayed as a breadcrumb trail under the page title), in the browser tab and address bar, in link previews on Slack and social media, and in raw form whenever someone copies and pastes a link into an email or a text message. In every one of those spots, a readable slug works as a second headline.

When a searcher sees example.com › blog › how-to-choose-running-shoes under a result, it reinforces that the page matches what they searched for — which measurably increases the odds they click instead of skipping to the next result. A slug like example.com › blog › post?id=4839&cat=12 gives them nothing to go on except the title text above it, and on platforms that strip or truncate titles, an opaque slug is actively off-putting: it reads as auto-generated, low-effort, or untrustworthy.

Keyword-rich slugs also compound over time. Every backlink, social share, and bookmark that includes your URL is effectively repeating your target keyword in a small but persistent way, across the web, for as long as that link exists. That's a benefit a slug like /p/4839 can never capture.

Titles in French, German, Spanish, and many other languages routinely include accented and special characters — é, ñ, ü, ø, ß, and more. Left as-is, these get percent-encoded into long, unreadable escape sequences the moment they hit a URL (a single “é” can become %C3%A9). The fix is transliteration: converting each accented character to its closest plain-ASCII equivalent before the slug is built.

This tool transliterates using Unicode normalization form NFD, which decomposes an accented letter like “é” into a base letter (“e”) plus a separate, invisible accent mark — then strips the accent mark, leaving plain “e”. German characters get special-cased on top of that, because a blind accent-strip would turn “ü” into “u” and “ß” into nothing — losing the sound entirely. Instead, ä/ö/ü map to ae/oe/ue and ß maps to ss, which is the standard German romanization and matches what most German websites already do in their own URLs. Turn the transliteration toggle off if you'd rather have accented characters stripped without substitution.

Use single mode when you're titling one page — a blog post, a product, a landing page — and want to see the slug update live as you refine the title. It's also the fastest way to sanity-check a slug before you paste it into your CMS.

Use bulk mode when you're migrating a site, importing a CSV of products, or generating slugs for an entire content calendar at once. Paste one title per line and the tool slugifies every line using the same separator, stopword, length, and transliteration settings — then copy the whole column or download it as a .txt file to paste straight into a spreadsheet next to your original titles.

• Keyword stuffing. Repeating your target phrase multiple times in one slug looks manipulative to search engines and to readers alike.
• Changing slugs after publishing. Every existing backlink and bookmark points at the old URL. If you must change a slug, set up a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one.
• Using stop-word-only slugs. A slug like /the-and-of (all filler, no keyword) provides zero SEO or usability value — this is why the stopword filter in this tool never empties a slug down to nothing.
• Mixing separators. Pick hyphens or underscores and stay consistent site-wide — mixing both across pages makes your URL structure look inconsistent and can confuse redirect rules.
• Leaving in file extensions or query strings that belong in the URL path, not the slug itself — keep the slug to the descriptive words only.