URL Slug Generator

What the slug generator does

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page: the how-to-calculate-roi in example.com/guides/how-to-calculate-roi. This tool turns any title or phrase into a clean slug — lowercase, words joined by hyphens, accents removed, punctuation stripped — that is safe in a URL, easy to read, and friendly to search engines. Paste a title, copy the slug. Everything runs in your browser.

What the conversion does

"How to Calculate ROI: A Beginner's Guide!"  →  how-to-calculate-roi-a-beginners-guide
"Café & Résumé Tips (2026)"                   →  cafe-resume-tips-2026
"  Multiple   spaces -- and dashes  "         →  multiple-spaces-and-dashes
"Über straße"                                 →  uber-strasse

Lowercases everything.
Transliterates accented and special Latin characters to ASCII (é → e, ß → ss, ø → o).
Replaces spaces, underscores and runs of punctuation with a single hyphen.
Removes apostrophes rather than replacing them, so beginner's becomes beginners.
Trims leading and trailing hyphens.

Why slugs matter for SEO

The URL is one of the signals search engines read, and it is shown in results and shared in messages. A descriptive slug tells both the crawler and the person what the page is about; /p?id=8812 tells neither. Google's guidance is to use words, keep them short, separate with hyphens, and avoid stuffing. The ranking effect is small but real, and the click-through effect — people prefer readable links — is larger.

Weak	Better	Why
/article.php?id=4471	/guides/simple-vs-compound-interest	Words instead of an ID
/how_to_calculate_roi	/how-to-calculate-roi	Google treats hyphens as word separators; underscores join words
/How-To-Calculate-ROI	/how-to-calculate-roi	Case-sensitive servers see two different pages
/the-complete-and-ultimate-guide-to-calculating-your-return-on-investment-in-2026	/how-to-calculate-roi	Shorter is easier to share and less likely to be truncated

Rules of thumb

3–6 words. Long enough to describe, short enough to remember.
Drop stop words where the meaning survives: guide-to-compound-interest reads fine without “the”.
Leave out dates and version numbers unless they are part of the topic — a slug with 2024 in it looks stale in 2026 and changing it breaks links.
Never change a published slug without a 301 redirect from the old one. Inbound links and rankings are attached to the URL.
Keep it ASCII for maximum compatibility, even though modern browsers support Unicode URLs. Non-Latin titles are better served by a transliterated or translated slug than by percent-encoded characters.

Slugs beyond web pages

File names — quarterly-report-q3.pdf survives every filesystem and upload form; Quarterly Report (Q3) FINAL.pdf does not.
Git branches and tags — feature/add-vat-calculator.
Database keys and identifiers — a slug column alongside a numeric ID is common in CMSs so URLs stay readable while lookups stay fast.
CSS classes and IDs — the same hyphenated lowercase convention.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to Thai, Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic text?

Non-Latin scripts cannot be mapped to ASCII letters simply, so they are removed. For those languages, write an English or romanised slug by hand, or keep the Unicode title as the slug if your platform supports it.

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word boundary and an underscore as a joiner, so word_one is indexed as a single token.

Is there a maximum slug length?

URLs can be about 2,000 characters, but keep slugs under 60–75 characters so they display in full in search results and social previews.

Does the slug need to match the page title exactly?

No. The title can be long and descriptive; the slug should be its shortest clear form.

How do I ensure slugs are unique?

Most CMSs append a number (my-post-2) on collision. Better: check before publishing and choose a more specific slug.

Is the text sent anywhere?

No. Conversion runs in your browser.