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Slug Generator

Turn a headline into a URL slug. Accents are converted rather than dropped, so “Café” becomes “cafe” instead of “caf”, and the optional length limit trims at a word boundary rather than mid-word.

Note

Everything happens in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.

How to use this tool

  1. Paste one or more titles, one per line.
  2. Choose a separator — hyphens are the standard choice for URLs.
  3. Optionally set a maximum length; the slug will be trimmed at a word boundary.

Worked examples

A blog headline

  1. Paste 'How to Calculate Compound Interest: A Beginner's Guide'

how-to-calculate-compound-interest-a-beginners-guide

A title with accents

  1. Paste 'Café au Lait Recipes'

cafe-au-lait-recipes

Notes and limitations

  • Hyphens are preferred over underscores in URLs. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so 'blue-widget' reads as two words and 'blue_widget' as one.
  • Accented Latin characters are converted to their base letters rather than being removed, so no letters are silently lost.
  • Scripts with no Latin equivalent — Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari — are kept as they are. Modern browsers and search engines handle them, and stripping them would return an empty slug.
  • The length limit trims at a separator so a word is never cut in half. If the limit already lands on a boundary, nothing extra is removed.
  • Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never uploaded to a server, which matters when what you are working on is a draft, a client list or anything else you would rather not send anywhere.

Frequently asked questions

What is a URL slug?

The readable part of a web address that identifies the page — in /blog/how-to-bake-bread, the slug is 'how-to-bake-bread'. A clear slug helps both readers and search engines understand what the page covers.

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator but an underscore as joining words together, so 'red_shoes' can be read as one term rather than two.

How long should a slug be?

Long enough to be clear, short enough to read at a glance — three to six words is a common target. There is no ranking penalty for a longer one, but it becomes awkward to share.

Should I include stop words like 'the' and 'a'?

Only if removing them makes the slug read badly. The old advice to strip every small word produced slugs that were hard to parse, and modern search engines handle them fine.

Can a slug contain non-English characters?

Yes. Browsers and search engines handle them, and for a non-English audience a slug in the right script is more useful than a transliteration. This tool preserves them.

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