🔗 Slug Generator
Turn any title into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug.
What is this tool?
A slug generator is a utility that converts a human-readable title or heading into a clean, URL-safe slug suitable for use in a web address. A slug is the descriptive part of a URL that comes after the domain, and a well-crafted slug helps both readers and search engines understand what a page is about. For example, the title "How to Bake the Perfect Sourdough Bread" becomes the slug "how-to-bake-the-perfect-sourdough-bread," which is far more meaningful than a generic identifier like "post-1234." Search engines such as Google use the words in a URL as a minor ranking signal, and human readers who see a descriptive link in search results are more likely to click it. A good slug is lowercase, uses hyphens to separate words, contains no spaces or special characters, and is kept reasonably short so it remains readable when shared on social media or pasted into a chat. This tool automates the entire conversion process so you do not have to retype or manually edit titles. It strips punctuation, replaces spaces and unsupported characters with your chosen separator, collapses any duplicated separators, trims stray separators from the ends, and optionally lowercases the result. Whether you are publishing a blog post, setting up product pages in an online store, organizing documentation, or naming files in a content repository, a slug generator ensures consistency across every URL you create and saves the tedious manual work of cleaning up titles by hand.How it works
The generator applies a sequence of normalization steps to your input text. First, it optionally converts the entire string to lowercase, which is the convention recommended by Google and followed by virtually every modern content management system. Next, it replaces sequences of characters that are not letters or digits, including spaces, punctuation marks, and symbols, with your chosen separator, either a hyphen or an underscore. Because several unsupported characters in a row would otherwise produce a run of several separators, the tool then collapses any duplicated separators into a single one. Finally, it trims any leading or trailing separators from the ends of the slug so the result starts and ends with a real word. The optional lowercase toggle lets you preserve original capitalization when you need a technical identifier such as a constant or a file name that follows a specific convention. All of these steps are performed with regular expressions in JavaScript, so they run instantly even on long titles, and because everything happens locally in your browser, the tool works offline and never transmits your text anywhere. The result is a slug that is safe to paste directly into WordPress, Ghost, Shopify, a static site generator, or any other publishing platform.How to use
Generating a slug takes only a few seconds.
- Paste or type your title, heading, or any piece of text into the input area.
- Choose a separator from the dropdown. Hyphen is the standard choice for web URLs because search engines treat it as a word separator; underscore is useful for technical identifiers or file names.
- Decide whether you want the output lowercased. The Lowercase option is on by default and recommended for web URLs; uncheck it only if you need to preserve capitalization for a specific convention.
- Click the Generate Slug button. The slug appears instantly in the output area. Click Copy to send it to your clipboard and paste it into your CMS, static site generator, or routing configuration.
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a URL slug?
A URL slug is the human-readable, keyword-rich part of a web address that identifies a specific page. In the URL "example.com/how-to-bake-bread," the slug is "how-to-bake-bread." Good slugs are lowercase, use hyphens to separate words, avoid special characters, and accurately describe the page content so that both readers and search engines understand what to expect.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in my slug?
Google explicitly recommends hyphens over underscores for web URLs because its parser treats a hyphen as a word separator, allowing it to recognize each word individually. An underscore is often treated as part of a single word, so "how_to_bake" may be read as a single token rather than three words. Use hyphens for public web page URLs and reserve underscores for technical identifiers such as variable names or database columns.
How long should a URL slug be?
Aim for three to five words and keep the slug under roughly 60 characters when possible. Shorter slugs are easier to read, quicker to type, and less likely to be truncated in search results. Drop stop words such as "the," "a," and "of" when they do not add meaning, and focus on the keywords that best describe the page.
Why are special characters removed from slugs?
Special characters such as apostrophes, ampersands, question marks, and accented letters can cause encoding problems, break links when copied between systems, or be misinterpreted by browsers and servers. Removing them and replacing them with a separator produces a stable, portable URL that works reliably across every platform and remains readable in address bars and analytics reports.
Tips &Advice
When crafting slugs for SEO, focus on the primary keyword that describes the page and drop filler words that add no meaning. Keep slugs stable over time because changing a URL after publication breaks inbound links and loses ranking signals unless you set up a redirect. If you manage a large site, establish a consistent slug convention, such as always lowercase, always hyphenated, and never more than five words, so every page follows the same pattern and the URL structure stays predictable. Avoid stuffing keywords into a slug; a natural, descriptive phrase beats a repetitive string of terms. For localized content, generate the slug from the language you are publishing in rather than translating the title, because translated slugs can introduce encoding issues. Finally, always test a new slug by pasting it into a browser address bar to confirm it resolves correctly and reads cleanly before you publish.