How to Generate a URL Slug
Paste a title or phrase, choose a separator and copy the URL slug. Review the result before assigning a permanent public URL. Changing an established slug later may require redirects and internal-link updates.
What Makes a Good SEO-Friendly Slug
A useful slug is readable, concise and stable. Keep enough context to distinguish similar pages. A slug generator cannot decide whether the resulting phrase accurately describes the destination or is unique in your routing system.
Hyphens vs Underscores
Hyphens are a familiar separator for readable web URLs. Underscores may be required by an existing convention. Choose one consistent policy and preserve old links when changing it.
Handling Accents, Symbols and Stop Words
The tool normalizes common accented characters and removes unsupported symbols. Transliteration is not complete for every language. Review non-Latin text and deliberate stop-word removal rather than assuming every shortened result remains meaningful.
Slug Examples
A phrase such as My New Article can become my-new-article. Punctuation and repeated whitespace should not create accidental empty segments. Check collisions when two different titles normalize to the same slug.
More examples and technical details
What a URL Slug Is
A slug is the human-readable tail of a URL that names a specific page. In example.com/blog/how-to-bake-bread, the slug is how-to-bake-bread. It is the part you can read aloud and actually understand, as opposed to an opaque numeric id. A good slug tells both the reader and the search engine what the page is about before anyone even clicks.
It matters for SEO because Google reads the words in the slug and treats hyphens as spaces between them. That is the single most important rule to remember: use hyphens, not underscores. Google joins words connected by an underscore, so word_two is read as the single token "wordtwo", while word-two is correctly read as two separate keywords. Getting this wrong quietly buries the keywords you were trying to surface.
Best Practices
A clean slug follows a short list of habits. Keep it lowercase, since some servers treat uppercase and lowercase paths as different pages. Use hyphens rather than underscores or spaces. Keep it short and focused on the keywords that matter, trimming filler words like a, the, and of when they add nothing. Strip out punctuation and special characters entirely, and transliterate accented letters so café becomes cafe rather than a percent-encoded mess.
Messy titles to clean slugs
| Title | Slug |
|---|---|
| 10 Tips for Better Sleep! | 10-tips-for-better-sleep |
| How to Cook Café Crème | how-to-cook-cafe-creme |
| The Best & Fastest Router (2024) | best-fastest-router-2024 |
| What Is a URL Slug? | what-is-a-url-slug |
Do Not Change a Live Slug Casually
Once a page is published and has been indexed, its slug is part of its identity. Every inbound link, every bookmark, and all the ranking authority the page has earned are tied to that exact URL. If you change the slug without setting up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one, those links break and the accumulated ranking largely evaporates. A 301 tells search engines the page moved permanently and passes the authority along, so if you must rename, always add the redirect at the same time.
The generator above slugifies your text entirely in your browser, so nothing you type is sent anywhere. Draft slugs for unpublished pages with no privacy worries at all.
Need something else? Explore every text tool in one place, all free and client-side.
Frequently asked questions
What is a URL slug?
It is the readable path segment identifying a page, such as my-article.
Are hyphens better than underscores?
Hyphens are the usual readable-word convention for URLs; preserve an existing routing policy when necessary.
Should URL slugs be lowercase?
Lowercase is a useful consistency policy because path handling can be case-sensitive.
How are accented characters handled?
Common accents are normalized, but the tool does not provide complete transliteration for every writing system.
Is the source text uploaded?
No. Input is processed in this browser tab and is not uploaded by the tool. Copy and download are actions you control; ordinary page analytics do not receive tool input.