🔗 URL Slug Generator
Turn "10 Café Recipes You’ll Love!" into 10-cafe-recipes-youll-love, the URL-safe version of any title.
How the url slug generator works
The text is lowercased, accented characters are transliterated to plain ASCII (café → cafe), everything that isn’t a letter or digit becomes the separator, and repeated or edge separators are trimmed. The result is safe for URLs, filenames and IDs. The steps run in order, lowercase, transliterate accents, replace each non-alphanumeric run with a single separator, then strip separators from the start and end, so multiple spaces or symbols never produce doubled or trailing separators.
Hyphens are the conventional separator for URLs, Google has long documented that it treats hyphens as word boundaries, while underscores join words. Keep slugs short, descriptive, and never change them after publishing (that is what redirects are for).
Frequently asked questions
Hyphens or underscores for SEO?
Hyphens. Google’s documentation treats hyphenated words as separate terms, while underscores can join them. Underscores remain common for filenames and code identifiers.
What happens to accents and special characters?
Accented letters map to their plain equivalents (café → cafe, señor → senor); symbols and punctuation become separators or vanish. The output is pure a, z, 0-9 and separators.
Should stop words like "a" and "the" be removed?
Optional, shorter slugs are tidier, but clarity beats brevity. "the-office" and "office" are different topics; keep words that carry meaning.
Can I change a slug after publishing?
Only with a 301 redirect from the old URL, otherwise links and rankings break. Best practice is choosing a stable slug once.
Why is my slug all lowercase?
URLs are case-sensitive on many servers, so mixed-case slugs risk broken links and duplicate-URL problems where /About and /about resolve differently. Lowercasing everything keeps them consistent.
What happens to numbers and existing hyphens?
Digits are kept, so "Top 10 Tips" becomes top-10-tips. Existing hyphens act as separators, and any run of spaces or symbols between words collapses to a single separator.
How long should a URL slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance, a few descriptive words is ideal. There is no hard character limit, but overly long slugs are harder to read and share, so trim filler words while keeping the terms that describe the page.
Can a slug start or end with a hyphen?
No, the generator strips separators from the start and end, so " Hello World! " becomes hello-world, never -hello-world-. Leading or trailing hyphens look broken in links and some systems reject them outright.
Is anything uploaded?
No, slug generation is local and instant.