What is a URL slug and why does it matter?

A slug is the readable, URL-safe part of a web address that names a page, like ten-best-recipes in example.com/ten-best-recipes. Clean, descriptive, hyphen-separated slugs are easier for people to read and share and help search engines understand the page, which is why most content platforms generate one from the title.

Can it handle accented or non-English characters?

Yes. With Strip accents / transliterate to ASCII on, accented letters are folded to plain ASCII (é to e, ü to u, ß to ss) for a strictly a to z, 0 to 9 slug. Turn it off to keep Unicode letters, so a non-Latin title stays in its original script instead of being reduced to ASCII.

Should I use a hyphen or an underscore as the separator?

Use a hyphen for web URLs — search engines treat hyphens as word separators, while underscores are read as joining characters. Underscores are a reasonable choice for filenames or code identifiers. The tool offers both plus a custom separator.

What does removing stop words do to my slug?

It drops short, common words such as a, the, of, and to, so a-guide-to-the-best-tools becomes guide-best-tools. That shortens the slug and focuses it on meaningful keywords. If a phrase is nothing but stop words, they are kept so the slug is never empty.

Is my text uploaded to a server?

No. All slug generation runs in your browser with JavaScript, so the text you paste never leaves your device — safe for unpublished titles, private documents, and draft content.

URL Slug Generator — Slugify Text Online

URL Slug Generator — Slugify Any Text Online

This free URL slug generator converts any title, heading, or phrase into a clean, URL-safe slug: it lowercases the text, replaces spaces, underscores, and punctuation with a single separator, collapses repeated separators, and trims them from the ends. Paste a blog post title, product name, or document heading and get a tidy permalink like ten-best-recipes-for-the-weekend that is safe to drop straight into a URL, filename, or anchor id.

You control the result: pick a hyphen, an underscore, or your own custom separator; strip accents and transliterate letters to plain ASCII so Creme brulee becomes creme-brulee; set a maximum length that truncates at a word boundary; and optionally remove common English stop words to keep slugs short and keyword-focused. Everything runs locally in your browser with JavaScript, so the text you paste is never uploaded, stored, or transmitted.

How to use URL Slug Generator

Paste or type your title or text into the input box.
Choose a word separator: hyphen (the web standard), underscore, or a custom character.
Toggle Lowercase and Strip accents / transliterate to ASCII to match how your platform builds URLs.
Optionally turn on a maximum length and Remove common English stop words for shorter slugs.
Read the live slug, check the character and word counts, and press Copy to grab it.

Options explained

Word separator — hyphen ( - ) is the SEO-friendly default that search engines treat as a space between words; underscore ( _ ) suits filenames and some code identifiers; a custom character covers anything else. Runs of the separator are always collapsed to one and trimmed from both ends.
Lowercase the slug — folds everything to lower case, the safest and most common choice because URLs are often treated case-insensitively and mixed-case links are easy to mistype.
Strip accents / transliterate to ASCII — decomposes accented letters and removes the marks (é to e, ü to u) and hand-maps letters Unicode cannot decompose (ø to o, ß to ss, æ to ae, þ to th), producing an ASCII-only slug. With it off, Unicode letters and numbers are preserved so non-English words survive intact.
Limit maximum length — caps the slug at a character count, dropping whole trailing words so the slug never ends mid-word (a single oversized word is hard-truncated as a last resort).
Remove common English stop words — drops short, low-signal words such as a, the, of, and to. If a phrase is made up entirely of stop words, they are kept so the slug is never empty.

How transliteration works

When Strip accents is on, the tool first spells out the ampersand and at sign, then runs Unicode NFKD normalization, which splits an accented character into a base letter plus a separate combining mark. Removing every combining mark (the \p{M} category) leaves the plain base letter. A small built-in map handles letters that do not decompose, such as the Scandinavian o-slash, the German sharp s, and the ae and oe ligatures, so they still reach a sensible ASCII spelling instead of being dropped.

Anything that still is not a plain ASCII letter or digit after this pass — CJK characters, emoji, and other symbols — is treated as a word boundary, guaranteeing a strictly a to z, 0 to 9 slug. Turn transliteration off when you deliberately want to keep non-Latin letters in the slug.

Input:  Crème brûlée: 10 Best Café Recipes!
Slug:   creme-brulee-10-best-cafe-recipes

Accents are stripped, punctuation becomes a single hyphen, and the ends are trimmed.

What makes a good URL slug

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page, for example the ten-best-recipes portion of a blog address. Good slugs are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII-only, and descriptive of the page, which helps both readers and search engines understand what a link points to before they click it.

Related terminology

Slug: The URL-friendly identifier for a page, made of lowercase letters, numbers, and separators, usually derived from the page title (for example my-first-post).
Separator: The character placed between words in a slug. A hyphen is the web standard; underscores are common in filenames and code.
Transliteration: Converting characters from one script or accented form into their closest plain ASCII equivalents, such as turning ü into u or ß into ss.
Diacritic / combining mark: An accent or mark added to a base letter (the acute in é, the umlaut in ü). NFKD normalization separates it so it can be removed, leaving the base letter.
Stop word: A very common, low-information word such as the, of, or and that is often removed from slugs to keep URLs short and focused on meaningful keywords.

Frequently asked questions

What is a URL slug and why does it matter?: A slug is the readable, URL-safe part of a web address that names a page, like ten-best-recipes in example.com/ten-best-recipes. Clean, descriptive, hyphen-separated slugs are easier for people to read and share and help search engines understand the page, which is why most content platforms generate one from the title.
How do I turn a title into a slug?: Paste the title into the input box. The tool instantly lowercases it, replaces spaces, underscores, and punctuation with a single separator, collapses repeats, and trims the ends. Adjust the separator and the accent, length, and stop-word options to taste, then press Copy.
Can it handle accented or non-English characters?: Yes. With Strip accents / transliterate to ASCII on, accented letters are folded to plain ASCII (é to e, ü to u, ß to ss) for a strictly a to z, 0 to 9 slug. Turn it off to keep Unicode letters, so a non-Latin title stays in its original script instead of being reduced to ASCII.
Should I use a hyphen or an underscore as the separator?: Use a hyphen for web URLs — search engines treat hyphens as word separators, while underscores are read as joining characters. Underscores are a reasonable choice for filenames or code identifiers. The tool offers both plus a custom separator.
What does removing stop words do to my slug?: It drops short, common words such as a, the, of, and to, so a-guide-to-the-best-tools becomes guide-best-tools. That shortens the slug and focuses it on meaningful keywords. If a phrase is nothing but stop words, they are kept so the slug is never empty.
Is my text uploaded to a server?: No. All slug generation runs in your browser with JavaScript, so the text you paste never leaves your device — safe for unpublished titles, private documents, and draft content.

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URL Slug Generator