A slug is the readable tail of a URL — the part after the domain that tells visitors and search engines what the page is about. Messy slugs full of capital letters, spaces, punctuation and filler words look unprofessional, break when shared, and waste a small but real relevance signal. This slug generator cleans any title or phrase into a tidy, URL-safe string: lowercase, accents converted to plain letters, punctuation removed and words joined by your choice of hyphens or underscores. You can also drop common stop words for shorter links. Paste a headline, tweak the options, and copy a slug that is ready for WordPress, a static site or any CMS.
Quick Answer: Enter a title, pick a separator and options, and the generator produces a lowercase, accent-free, URL-safe slug you can copy straight into your CMS.
Free Online Tool
Slug Generator
Turn a headline into a permalink you would happily share.
How to Use the Slug Generator
- Type or paste the page title or phrase you want to convert.
- Choose hyphens (recommended for SEO) or underscores as the separator.
- Optionally tick ‘remove stop words’ to drop words like ‘the’, ‘and’ and ‘of’ for a shorter slug.
- Review the generated slug in the output box.
- Copy it and use it as your page’s permalink.
Key Features
- Instant conversion of titles, headlines and phrases into clean slugs.
- Accent handling: é, ü, ñ and friends become plain ASCII letters.
- Choice of hyphen or underscore separators.
- Optional stop-word removal for compact URLs.
- One-click copy, and the tool runs entirely in your browser.
Best Practices and Tips
- Keep slugs short but meaningful — three to six content words is a good range for most pages.
- Hyphens are the separator search engines recommend; underscores are treated as joiners, which can merge words.
- Include the main keyword once, naturally — a slug is a label, not a keyword list.
- Avoid dates in slugs for evergreen content so URLs stay valid when you update the page.
- Once a page is live and indexed, changing its slug needs a redirect; pick carefully the first time.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Leaving the full sentence as the slug, filler words and all, producing a URL nobody wants to share.
- Using uppercase letters or spaces, which some servers handle inconsistently and which look broken in messages.
- Changing slugs on established pages without redirects, throwing away existing rankings and backlinks.
- Stuffing multiple keyword variations into one slug — it reads as spam and helps nothing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a good slug?
A good slug is short, lowercase, descriptive and stable. It uses hyphens between words, contains the page’s core topic, and avoids filler, dates and special characters. Think of it as the title with everything unnecessary stripped away.
Should I remove stop words?
Usually yes for long titles — removing ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’ and similar words shortens the URL without losing meaning. Keep them if removing them makes the slug ambiguous or awkward to read.
Hyphens or underscores — which is better?
Hyphens. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators, so ‘best-running-shoes’ is read as three words. Underscores are treated as part of a single token, which can blur the topic of the page.
Can this handle non-English titles?
Yes, accented Latin characters are converted to their base letters (é becomes e, ñ becomes n). Characters from scripts that cannot be transliterated simply are removed, so check the result for those titles.
Does changing a slug hurt SEO?
It can if the old URL had rankings or links and no redirect is set up. With a proper 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one, the impact is minimal and usually temporary.
Related Tools
- Meta Tag Generator – builds ready-to-paste SEO and social meta tags from a simple form
- Meta Title & Description Length Checker – checks title and description lengths with a search-result preview
- Keyword Density Checker – measures how often a keyword or phrase appears in your copy
- Remove Extra Spaces – cleans double spaces, tabs and ragged line breaks from text