Slug Generator
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page, such as 'my-first-post' in example.com/blog/my-first-post. A slug generator converts any title or phrase into this URL-friendly format by lowercasing the text, removing accents and special characters, and replacing spaces with hyphens. Clean slugs improve readability for visitors, are easier to share, and give search engines a clear signal about the page's topic.
Well-formed slugs matter for SEO because search engines display them in results and use the words they contain as a relevance signal. Google's own guidelines recommend simple, descriptive words in URLs and hyphens rather than underscores as word separators. This tool also lets you choose the separator character and limit the maximum length, which helps keep URLs concise — long, keyword-stuffed slugs are harder to read and can get truncated in search snippets.
How it works
Slug generation follows a deterministic text pipeline: the input is Unicode-normalized (NFD) so accented letters split into a base letter plus a combining mark, the combining marks are stripped (é → e, ç → c), the text is lowercased, any character that is not a letter or digit is removed or treated as a boundary, consecutive boundaries collapse into a single separator (usually a hyphen), and leading or trailing separators are trimmed. An optional maximum length then truncates the result at the last full word.
Use cases
- Creating SEO-friendly URLs for blog posts and news articles from their headlines
- Generating product page slugs for e-commerce catalogs with accented or special characters
- Producing consistent file names, anchors, and IDs from human-readable titles
- Migrating content between CMS platforms while normalizing legacy URLs
Frequently asked questions
What is a slug in a URL?
A slug is the final, human-readable segment of a URL that identifies a specific page, such as 'chocolate-cake-recipe' in example.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-recipe. It is usually derived from the page title, written in lowercase, with words separated by hyphens and without accents or special characters. Good slugs tell both users and search engines what the page is about before it even loads.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in URL slugs?
Use hyphens. Google's documentation explicitly recommends hyphens (-) as word separators in URLs because its systems treat a hyphen as a word boundary, while words joined by underscores may be read as a single term. Hyphens are also the established convention across the web, so they meet user expectations.
How do I remove accents from text for a URL?
The standard technique is Unicode normalization: the text is decomposed with NFD normalization so each accented letter becomes a base letter plus a separate combining mark, and the combining marks are then stripped. This turns 'café' into 'cafe' and 'ação' into 'acao'. This slug generator applies that process automatically along with lowercasing and separator handling.
How long should a URL slug be for SEO?
There is no fixed limit, but shorter, descriptive slugs of roughly 3 to 5 words tend to work best. They are easier to read, less likely to be truncated in search results, and force you to focus on the words that actually describe the page. Remove filler words like 'the', 'a', and 'of' when they add no meaning.
Does changing a page slug hurt SEO?
Changing a slug changes the URL, so any existing rankings, backlinks, and bookmarks point to a page that no longer exists. If you must change a slug, set up a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one so link equity is passed along and visitors are not met with a 404 error. Avoid changing slugs on established pages without a strong reason.