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URL slug generator

Convert any title or heading into a clean URL slug — lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII-safe. Handles accents, emoji, and punctuation correctly.

Title or heading

Separator

Lowercase Strip stop words (the, a, an, of, in…) Transliterate accents to ASCII

Slug

What a URL slug is

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page. In https://stoolme.com/tools/slug-generator, the slug is slug-generator. Good slugs are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII-only, and descriptive of the page they identify.

What this tool does

Type or paste any title and the tool produces a clean URL slug from it. It lowercases the text, transliterates accented characters to their ASCII equivalents, removes punctuation, and joins the remaining words with a separator of your choice.

Why slugs matter for SEO

A descriptive slug helps both users and search engines understand what a page is about before they click. Google has confirmed that words in URLs are a (small) ranking signal. More important: slugs that describe the page get higher click-through rates in search results, in social-media previews, and when people share the link in plain text.

Best practices, summarized:

Use lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens.
Keep it short — three to five meaningful words is typical.
Use hyphens, not underscores. Google treats hyphens as word separators; underscores it doesn't.
Strip stop words ("the", "a", "of") only if the slug is still readable without them.
Use ASCII characters only. Browsers can render IRI URLs containing Unicode, but copies-and-pastes, link shares, and analytics dashboards often mangle them.

Examples

Title	Default slug
How to make sourdough at home	`how-to-make-sourdough-at-home`
10 best côtelettes in Paris!	`10-best-cotelettes-in-paris`
What's the difference between TCP and UDP?	`whats-the-difference-between-tcp-and-udp`
München → Berlin train guide	`munchen-berlin-train-guide`

Hyphen or underscore?

Hyphen. Google has stated multiple times that foo-bar is parsed as two words and foo_bar as one. The only place underscores are conventional is for internal-use slugs that should be visually distinct from public ones, or filenames where some build tools prefer them.

How accents are handled

By default the tool transliterates accented characters to their unaccented ASCII equivalents using Unicode NFKD normalization. "Café" becomes "cafe"; "Łukasz" becomes "ukasz" (the bar-through-L doesn't have a clean ASCII equivalent and is dropped). If your site supports IRIs and you want to keep the original characters, turn off the "Transliterate accents" option.

Privacy

The transformation runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?

Hyphens. Google parses foo-bar as two words and foo_bar as one. Hyphens win every time for SEO.

What's the ideal length for a slug?

Three to five meaningful words is a good target. Long slugs aren't penalized, but they get truncated in search snippets and are harder to share.

Why does my slug have leading or trailing hyphens?

It shouldn't — the tool collapses runs of separators and strips them from the ends. If you see this, please send a bug report.

Can I keep accented characters in the slug?

Yes. Turn off "Transliterate accents to ASCII". Modern browsers and CMS systems support Unicode in URLs, but be aware that link previews, analytics, and link-shorteners sometimes mangle them.

Will changing my slug affect SEO?

Yes — a URL change is treated as a new page by search engines. Always set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one when you rename a published page.

Are there words I should always avoid in slugs?

Avoid date components if the content is evergreen (so the URL stays accurate), and avoid generic words like "page", "post", or "article" that don't describe the content.