A slug is the human readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page, typically derived from the page title but simplified and lowercased.

Should I use hyphens or underscores in my slug?

Hyphens are standard, Google treats them as word separators while underscores are sometimes read as one joined word.

Does removing stop words hurt my SEO?

No, removing common stop words is widely accepted practice and keeps the slug focused on meaningful keywords.

How long should a URL slug be?

No strict limit, but shorter slugs under about 60 characters tend to perform better and stay fully visible in search results.

What happens to accented characters like e-acute or n-tilde?

They are automatically converted to their closest plain ASCII equivalent to keep URLs universally readable.

Can I change a slug after a page is already published?

Yes, but set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one to preserve rankings and avoid broken links.

Should the slug match my page title exactly?

Not necessarily, titles can be longer and descriptive while slugs stay short and keyword focused.

Does this tool store the titles I convert?

No, all conversion happens locally in your browser, nothing is sent to a server or stored.

📈 SEO & Marketing Free Forever

Slug Generator, Turn Any Title Into a Clean URL Slug

This slug generator converts any title or phrase into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug instantly. Choose hyphens or underscores, strip stop words, set a max length, and convert entire lists at once, no sign up needed.

All SEO & Marketing Tools

Title or text

Try:

Your slug appears here

Separator

Case

Date prefix

Max length No limit

Remove stop words like the, and, of

Why accents need converting, not deleting. Stripping anything that is not a plain letter turns “Crème brûlée” into “crme-brle”, which is unreadable and unsearchable. Unicode normalisation splits an accented character into its base letter plus a separate accent mark, so removing just the marks leaves “creme-brulee”. Letters with no Latin base, like ß and ø, and whole alphabets like Cyrillic and Greek, get an explicit conversion instead.

Hyphens beat underscores. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so web_development reads as a single word while web-development reads as two. Use hyphens for anything you want found.

Keep it short. Three or four meaningful words beat a full sentence. Long slugs get truncated in search results, wrap badly when shared, and rarely add anything the first few words did not already say.

About This Tool

The exact transformation rules this slug generator applies to every line

A slug generator sounds trivial until you feed it a title with an accented letter, an ampersand, or a stray apostrophe. This tool runs entirely in your browser, nothing you type is sent anywhere, and it processes each line of input through the same fixed sequence of string operations, so the same title always produces the same slug regardless of order in the batch.

The transformation pipeline, in order

Step 1 Unicode normalize and strip diacritics The text is run through String.normalize('NFKD'), which decomposes accented characters into a base letter plus a separate combining mark, then a regex strips every character in the Unicode combining diacritical marks block. A word like café becomes cafe, not caf followed by a dropped letter.

Step 2 Lowercase The whole string is lowercased after normalization, not before, since case folding an accented character before decomposition can behave inconsistently across locales.

Step 3 Expand the ampersand Every & becomes the literal word and, surrounded by spaces, so Sales & Marketing becomes sales and marketing rather than losing the word entirely.

Step 4 Strip disallowed characters Anything that is not a lowercase letter, digit, whitespace, hyphen or underscore is replaced with a space, so punctuation, emoji and symbols disappear cleanly instead of leaving broken fragments.

Step 5 Split, filter stopwords, join The string is split on any run of whitespace, hyphens or underscores into individual words. If stopword removal is enabled, common function words are filtered out before the words are rejoined with your chosen separator.

Step 6 Enforce a max length If a maximum length is set and the slug runs over it, the string is truncated, then trimmed back to the last separator if that separator falls past 60 percent of the max length, so you never end a slug mid-word.

// slugify(), adapted from source function slugify(text, sep, maxLen, stripStop) { var s = text.normalize(‘NFKD’).replace(/[̀-ͯ]/g, ”).toLowerCase(); s = s.replace(/&/g, ‘ and ‘); s = s.replace(/[^a-z0-9\s\-_]/g, ‘ ‘); var words = s.split(/[\s_-]+/).filter(Boolean); if (stripStop) words = words.filter(function(w){ return STOP_WORDS.indexOf(w) === -1; }); return words.join(sep); }

The stopword list

When enabled, the tool filters out 22 common English function words: a, an, the, and, or, but, of, in, on, at, to, for, with, by, is, are, was, were, be, been, it, this, and that. This is a fixed list built into the source, not configurable per language, so it is most useful for English titles and will leave equivalent function words in other languages untouched.

Input title	Default output	With stopwords removed
10 Tips for Better Sleep & Focus	10-tips-for-better-sleep-and-focus	10-tips-better-sleep-and-focus
The Café on 5th Street	the-cafe-on-5th-street	cafe-5th-street

The character allowlist is intentionally narrow. Only lowercase a through z, digits, hyphens and underscores survive. That means slugs generated from non-Latin scripts, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, or similar, will lose nearly all of their characters after transliteration and diacritic stripping, since NFKD normalization only decomposes accented Latin letters, it does not transliterate other scripts into Latin equivalents. For non-Latin content, treat this tool’s output as a fallback ASCII slug alongside the native script URL, not a replacement for it.

Separator choice

Hyphens are the standard recommendation since Google explicitly treats them as word separators in URLs, while underscores are historically treated as joining characters rather than separators, which can merge words together in search indexing.

Bulk mode and export

Paste one title per line and every row gets its own slug, an optional base URL preview column, and a per-row copy button, plus a Copy All and a CSV download for dropping straight into a spreadsheet or CMS import.

Pure client-side, no data leaves your browser NFKD Unicode normalization 22-word English stopword list

URL structure references

Google’s URL structure guidance recommends simple, readable, hyphen separated URLs over long parameter strings or underscore joined words.
Unicode Standard Annex 15 documents the NFKD normalization form this tool relies on to separate base letters from diacritical marks.

URL decisions that stick

Converting a batch of blog post titles into clean URL slugs before a CMS import, generating consistent product URL segments from a spreadsheet of names, cleaning up an old site’s inconsistent URL casing and punctuation during a migration, and quickly checking how a title with special characters will resolve into a URL before publishing.

Common Questions

FAQ: Slug Generator

A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in a human readable form, for example in convertnow.tools/tools/seo-marketing/slug-generator/, “slug-generator” is the slug. It’s typically derived from the page’s title but simplified, lowercased, and stripped of punctuation so it reads cleanly in a browser address bar and search results.

Hyphens are the standard recommendation. Google has confirmed it treats hyphens as word separators when parsing a URL for its meaning, effectively reading “coffee-shops” as two words. Underscores are sometimes treated as a single joined word instead, which can slightly hurt how search engines interpret the slug’s individual keywords. Most CMS platforms, including WordPress, default to hyphens for this reason.

No, removing common stop words like “a,” “the,” “of,” and “and” from a slug is a widely accepted practice and generally considered good for SEO, since it shortens the URL and keeps the focus on meaningful keywords without changing what the page is actually about. Google’s own guidance favors short, descriptive URLs over long, exact-match phrasing.

There’s no strict character limit enforced by search engines, but shorter slugs, generally under 60 characters or so, tend to perform better in practice since they’re fully visible in search results without being truncated and are easier for people to read and remember. Focus on including the most important 3 to 6 keywords rather than mirroring your entire title.

They’re automatically converted to their closest plain ASCII equivalent, so “café” becomes “cafe” and “château” becomes “chateau.” This keeps URLs universally readable and avoids encoding issues that can occur with non-ASCII characters in some browsers, servers, and sharing contexts.

Yes, but changing a slug on a page that’s already indexed and receiving traffic or backlinks means the old URL will 404 unless you set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. It’s best to finalize a slug before publishing when possible, and to always add a redirect if you do need to change one later, to preserve existing search rankings and avoid broken links.

Not necessarily, and often it shouldn’t. Titles can be longer and more descriptive for readers and click-through appeal, “10 Best Coffee Shops in New York City You Need to Try in 2026,” while the slug can be a shorter, keyword focused version like “best-coffee-shops-nyc.” The slug’s job is to be a clean, permanent identifier, not a full restatement of the title.

No, all conversion happens locally in your browser using JavaScript text processing, nothing you type is sent to a server, logged, or stored.

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