A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page. For example, in "example.com/blog/my-first-post", the slug is "my-first-post". Slugs are lowercase, hyphen-separated, and contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Why are slugs important for SEO?

Slugs are one of the most important on-page SEO factors. A descriptive, keyword-rich slug helps search engines understand what a page is about. Short, clean slugs also perform better in click-through rates than long or encoded URLs.

What does the slug generator do to special characters?

The generator: lowercases all letters, removes diacritics and accents (é → e, ü → u, ñ → n), replaces spaces and non-alphanumeric characters with hyphens, collapses multiple hyphens into one, and removes leading/trailing hyphens.

How is a slug different from kebab-case?

A slug is specifically optimized for URLs with extra normalization: diacritics are removed, special characters are stripped, and consecutive hyphens are collapsed. kebab-case is a more general naming convention that doesn't handle these URL-specific concerns.

What is the ideal slug length for SEO?

SEO best practices recommend keeping slugs under 60 characters. Shorter slugs are generally better - they're easier to read, share, and remember. Focus on 2-5 keywords rather than including every word from a title.

Is my text stored anywhere?

No. All processing happens in your browser. Your text never leaves your device.

Slug Generator

Generate URL-friendly slugs from any text. Free online slug generator - removes special characters, lowercases, uses hyphens.

🔒 Your text stays in your browser - nothing is sent to our servers

Input

0Characters

0No spaces

0Words

0Sentences

0Lines

< 1 minRead time

Result

How to Use

Three steps to get started

Paste your title

Enter a blog post title, article heading, or any text you want to slugify.

Slug generated

Special characters removed, spaces become hyphens, accents normalized: my-blog-post.

Copy and use

Click Copy and paste into your CMS, URL field, or routing config.

About This Tool

Generate clean, SEO-friendly URL slugs instantly

A URL slug is the human-readable segment of a web address that identifies one specific page - the my-first-post inexample.com/blog/my-first-post. The term comes from newsroom jargon, where a "slug" was the short working name typesetters used to track a story through production. On the web it serves the same purpose: a short, stable, lowercase identifier made only of letters, digits, and hyphens.

What the generator does automatically:

Converts to lowercase, since Apache and nginx treat paths as case-sensitive and /About and /about can resolve differently
Removes accents and diacritics by decomposing to Unicode NFD and dropping combining marks (café → cafe, naïve → naive, Müller → muller)
Replaces spaces and every non-alphanumeric character with a hyphen
Collapses runs of consecutive hyphens into a single one
Trims leading and trailing hyphens so the slug never starts or ends with a separator

Example: "10 Tips for Better Writing!" → 10-tips-for-better-writing

Why hyphens and not underscores?

This is settled, not a preference. Google's own URL structure documentation recommends hyphens and states that underscores are not treated as word separators - so red_shoes can be read as the single token red_shoeswhile red-shoes is read as two words. The same logic rules out spaces, which get percent-encoded into %20 and turn a shareable link into an unreadable string when pasted into chat.

A few practical rules beyond formatting. Keep slugs under about 60 characters and 2–5 meaningful keywords; longer paths get truncated in search snippets. Avoid dates and sequence numbers unless the content is genuinely time-bound, because/2019-guide-to-css looks stale forever. Most importantly, treat a published slug as permanent - changing it breaks every inbound link and social share unless you configure a 301 redirect from the old path, which WordPress, Ghost, and Next.js all support but none do automatically for hand-edited slugs.

The slugification runs as a small regex pipeline in your own browser, so drafting unpublished titles here leaves no trace on any server.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

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