How to create a URL slug
- Type or paste a title, or several titles on separate lines.
- Each one is turned into a clean slug instantly: lower case, accents removed, spaces and punctuation replaced by hyphens.
- Choose the separator, a maximum length and whether to remove short stop words such as "the" and "of".
- Copy the slugs into your CMS, file names or code.
What makes a good slug?
A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies a page, such as /blog/grow-tomatoes-small-gardens. Good slugs are short, descriptive, all lower case and use hyphens between words. Google treats hyphens as word separators but not underscores, and URLs are case-sensitive on many servers, so lower case avoids duplicate pages. Keep slugs stable: changing them later breaks links unless you add redirects.
The converter transliterates accented and special characters rather than dropping them: café becomes cafe, straße becomes strasse and & becomes and. Characters from non-Latin scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic or Chinese are kept, since modern browsers display them fine, though some teams prefer to transliterate them manually.
The maximum length cuts at a word boundary, so slugs never end mid-word. Slugs are also handy for file names, CSS class names, anchors and database keys. Everything runs locally.
Should I remove stop words from slugs?
Removing words like "a", "the" and "of" makes slugs shorter. Keep them if the slug would read oddly without them.
Hyphens or underscores in URLs?
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a space between words, while underscores join words together.
How long should a slug be?
Three to five meaningful words, ideally under 60 characters.