URL Slug Generator
Turn a title into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug: lowercase, hyphenated, accent-stripped, and free of special characters.
Turn a headline or product name into a clean URL slug — lowercase, hyphen-separated, with accents flattened and punctuation removed. Good slugs are short, readable, and stable, which helps both users and search engines.
What makes a good slug
A strong slug is short, descriptive, and readable. Use hyphens rather than underscores (search engines treat hyphens as word separators), keep everything lowercase to avoid duplicate-URL issues, strip accents and symbols, and drop filler words if the slug gets long. Once a page is published, keep its slug stable — changing it breaks links and forces redirects.
Why slugs matter for SEO
A clean slug helps both people and search engines understand a page before they open it. Descriptive, hyphenated slugs like /best-running-shoes read better in results and links than opaque ones like /p?id=8842. Keep them short, lowercase, and free of dates or stop words you might regret. Most importantly, once a URL is live and indexed, resist changing its slug — doing so breaks inbound links and forces redirects that dilute ranking signals.
What makes a good URL slug
A slug is the human-readable tail of a web address — the how-to-bake-bread in /blog/how-to-bake-bread. Good slugs are short, lowercase, and use hyphens rather than spaces or underscores, because search engines treat hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners. They should carry the one or two keywords that describe the page and drop filler words like "the" and "of" that add length without meaning. A visitor should be able to guess what a page contains from the slug alone.
Consistency matters as much as any single rule. If half your URLs use hyphens and half use underscores, or some include dates and others don't, you create needless confusion and occasional duplicate-content headaches. Decide on a pattern and let a generator enforce it, stripping accents, punctuation, and emoji that would otherwise be percent-encoded into unreadable noise. One caution: once a URL is published and indexed, changing its slug breaks existing links unless you set up a redirect, so get the slug right before you hit publish rather than tidying it later.
Frequently asked questions
Should URL slugs use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines read hyphens as spaces between words, while underscores can join words together, so hyphens are the SEO-friendly choice.
What are stop words and should I remove them?
Stop words are common filler like 'the', 'a', and 'of'. Removing them shortens a slug, which is optional — only do it if the slug is long and the words add nothing.
Should I put keywords in the slug?
A primary keyword or two helps, as long as the slug stays natural and short. Don't stuff it — a readable slug outperforms a keyword-crammed one.
What happens to accented or non-Latin characters?
This tool flattens accents (café becomes cafe) and strips characters outside a-z and 0-9, producing a clean ASCII slug that works reliably in every browser and system.
Should slugs include stop words like 'and' or 'the'?
Usually not. Removing common filler words keeps slugs short and keyword-focused, though you can keep one if dropping it would make the slug read strangely.
Last updated: 2026-01-15