URL Slug Generator
Turn any headline into a clean, lowercase, hyphenated URL slug — accents transliterated, punctuation dropped, filler words optional, and a length limit that cuts at a word boundary instead of mid-word.
0 = no limit
your-slug-appears-here
What this tool does
Paste a headline, a page title or a messy URL and this tool turns it into a slug — the lowercase, hyphenated fragment that identifies the page in its address. It transliterates accents to ASCII, drops punctuation, collapses repeated separators, and can remove the filler words that make an address longer without making it any clearer.
The honest reason to care is readability, not ranking. Google has said for years that keywords in a URL are a very small signal, so a tidy slug will not lift a page on its own. What it does change is how the link looks in the address bar, in the breadcrumb of a search result, and when someone pastes it into a chat. Everything runs in your browser, so pasting an unpublished headline or a client's draft title is safe.
How to use it
- Paste your headline into the box. The slug builds as you type — there is no generate button, because there is nothing to wait for.
- Choose a separator. Hyphens are the convention and what Google's own URL guidance uses. Underscores are treated as word-joiners by some older systems, and no separator at all only makes sense for very short slugs.
- Set a maximum length if your CMS or platform imposes one. The cut backs up to the nearest separator, so you get a shorter slug rather than half a word.
- Read the notes under the result before you copy. They name any characters that had to be dropped and any words lost to stop-word removal, so nothing about the result is a surprise.
Common use cases
-
Publishing a new page
You have a finished headline and an empty slug field. This turns one into the other without a retype, which is where the typos and the accidental double hyphen come from.
-
Planning a migration
Run a batch of page titles through to get candidate slugs, then compare them against the URLs you already have before you rewrite anything or write a single redirect.
-
Titles with accents
Café, jalapeño and Ångström become cafe, jalapeno and angstrom instead of turning into percent-encoded sequences nobody can read or type.
-
Filenames and anchors
A good filename and a good heading anchor follow the same rules as a good URL: lowercase words, joined by hyphens, with no spaces or punctuation to escape.
Frequently asked questions
Do hyphens or underscores matter for SEO?
Hyphens are the safer choice. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, so free-invoice-generator reads as three words, while some crawlers and older systems join an underscore, making free_invoice_generator one long unbroken word. The ranking difference is negligible either way; the difference in how the link reads to a person is not.
How long should a URL slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance — three to five words is a reasonable target, and there is no ranking benefit in going longer. Length is a display problem rather than a ranking one: long URLs are truncated in some search results, in chat previews and in analytics reports, and it is always the end of the slug that gets cut. Set the length limit here if you have a hard ceiling to respect.
Should I change the slug on a page that already ranks?
Usually not. The words in a URL are a very small ranking signal, so a rewrite rarely earns back what it costs: the old address loses whatever link and click history it had accumulated, and every existing link to it breaks until a redirect is in place. Change it when the current slug is actually wrong, and publish a 301 redirect from the old address the same day. Never leave both URLs serving the same page.