Slug Generator
Convert any text into a clean, URL-safe slug.
your-slug-here
What is a URL slug?
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page — the hello-world-this-is-a-test in example.com/blog/hello-world-this-is-a-test. Good slugs are lowercase, accent-free, and use hyphens or underscores to separate words instead of spaces or special characters. This tool transliterates Unicode rather than merely dropping it — accents fold (é → e), and letters that have no “base plus accent” form get a real spelling (ß → ss, æ → ae, ø → o, þ → th). Cyrillic and Greek are romanised too, so Привет Мир becomes privet-mir instead of an empty slug. Punctuation is stripped and repeated separators collapse. All processing happens locally in your browser.
Related tools: URL Encoder · Find and Replace Text
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Producing a URL-safe path segment from a post title.
- Normalising a filename from a human-readable label.
- Generating a consistent anchor id from a heading.
- Converting a title with accents and punctuation into a clean slug.
- Producing a slug to compare against an existing one before a rename.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a URL slug?
- A slug is the URL-friendly version of a title used as the last segment of a URL path. Example: 'My Favorite Tools 2024!' becomes 'my-favorite-tools-2024'. Slugs use only lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens.
- Why are slugs lowercase and hyphen-separated?
- Lowercase avoids case-sensitivity issues between servers. Hyphens are preferred over underscores because Google treats hyphens as word separators — better for SEO keyword matching in the URL.
- How are accented and special characters handled?
- Accented characters are transliterated to ASCII equivalents (é → e, ñ → n, ü → u). This ensures URL portability — not all systems and URL parsers handle multibyte characters in path segments correctly.
- Can I use numbers in a slug?
- Yes. Numbers are kept as-is (e.g. 'top-10-developer-tools'). The only restrictions: use a-z, 0-9, and hyphens only; avoid starting or ending with a hyphen; no consecutive double-hyphens.
- Do slugs affect SEO ranking?
- Yes, modestly. Keywords in slugs are a minor ranking signal. Keep slugs short (3–5 meaningful words), include the primary keyword near the start, and omit stop words (a, the, in) for the cleanest result.
- What should happen when a slug already exists?
- Append a short suffix rather than reusing or silently overwriting — a numeric counter or a short hash. The important part is that the original slug keeps pointing at the original content, since URLs are permanent in practice.
Common errors and gotchas
- Changing a published slug without a redirect, which breaks every existing link to it.
- Losing meaning by transliterating a non-Latin title into nothing useful.
- Producing a slug so long it is truncated inconsistently by different systems.
- Allowing two titles to collapse to the same slug and not handling the collision.
- Including a date or an id in the slug and then needing to change one of them.