URL Slug Generator

What a URL slug is, and why it is worth ten seconds of thought

The slug is the human-readable tail of a web address — the how-to-make-french-press-coffee part of example.com/blog/how-to-make-french-press-coffee. It is the one piece of a URL you fully control, it shows up in search results under the title, and it is what people see when a link is pasted into Slack or a text message. A clean slug tells a reader what is on the other side of the click before they take it; a slug like ?p=4127 tells them nothing.

Worked example: a headline becomes a slug

Start with the title How to Make French Press Coffee at Home. The generator does four things in order. First it trims the outside whitespace. Second it lowercases, because URLs are case-sensitive on most servers and a stray capital creates a second address for the same page. Third it folds accented Latin letters down to their base letters. Fourth it replaces every run of non-letter, non-digit characters with a single separator and trims any separator left at the ends.

The result is how-to-make-french-press-coffee-at-home — 39 characters, comfortably inside the 60-character range that displays in full on a search results page. Tick Remove stop words and to and at disappear, giving how-make-french-press-coffee-home at 33 characters. Shorter, keyword-dense, and slightly robotic to read. Both versions rank; pick the one you would be happy reading aloud on a podcast.

Worked example: punctuation, accents and numbers

Take Café Owner's Guide to Décor (2026 Edition). The accented é characters fold to e, the apostrophe is deleted rather than turned into a separator — so Owner's becomes owners, not owner-s — and the brackets collapse into single hyphens instead of leaving a double hyphen behind. Out comes cafe-owners-guide-to-decor-2026-edition, 39 characters. Numbers survive because they carry meaning: model numbers, years and sizes are often exactly what people type into search.

Five rules for slugs that hold up

Keep it under about 60 characters. Google truncates long URLs in the results snippet, and a truncated slug loses its persuasive value. Sixty characters is roughly six to eight words.

Put the keyword near the front. Both crawlers and human eyes weight the left-hand side of a URL. /french-press-coffee-guide beats /guide-to-brewing-various-methods-including-french-press.

Leave dates out. A slug like /best-laptops-2025 looks stale the moment the calendar turns, and updating the article means either living with the wrong year or changing the URL. Use /best-laptops and put the year in the title tag, which you can edit freely.

Do not stuff. Repeating the keyword — /coffee-french-press-coffee-maker-coffee — reads as spam to people and adds nothing for search engines.

Match the site's existing pattern. If every other post uses hyphens and no stop words, a single underscore-and-stop-word slug is the odd one out. Consistency is easier to maintain than perfection.

Diacritics: fold them or keep them?

For Latin-script languages, folding is the safe default. Café becomes cafe, Zürich becomes zurich, Łódź becomes lodz. The address stays typeable on any keyboard and survives being copied into systems that mangle non-ASCII characters. The tool does this with Unicode NFD decomposition — splitting a letter into its base plus its accent mark — then dropping the marks and recomposing, which is why it handles letters it has never specifically been taught. A handful of letters do not decompose at all (ß, ø, æ, þ) and are mapped by hand: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae.

Non-Latin scripts are left exactly as they are. Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic and Devanagari characters pass through untouched, because there is no single correct romanisation and guessing one would be worse than doing nothing. Percent-encoded UTF-8 slugs are fully supported by browsers and search engines; they simply look long and unreadable when copied into a plain-text field.

Notes for common platforms

WordPress generates a slug from the post title automatically and lets you edit it in the Permalink box — do it before publishing, because WordPress does not create a redirect when you change it later. Shopify keeps the old handle and issues a redirect for products, but only if you leave the "create a URL redirect" box ticked. Ghost and Webflow behave like WordPress. Static site generators such as Hugo, Astro and Next.js usually derive the slug from the file name, so renaming the file changes the URL and you have to add the redirect yourself in the host's config.

Limitations worth knowing

This tool does not transliterate — it will not turn Москва into moskva, because a correct transliteration depends on the language and the standard you follow. It does not check whether the slug is already used on your site, so duplicates are still your responsibility; most CMSs will silently append -2. It also does not strip the stop words of any language other than English, since removing the wrong short word in German or Spanish can change the meaning entirely. Everything runs locally in the browser, so nothing you paste is transmitted anywhere.