URL Slug Generator

URL Slug Generator

Convert titles into URL slugs that survive every server and CMS. Transliterates accents, expands symbols like & and %, optionally strips stop words, and truncates at word boundaries instead of mid-word.

Accent and diacritic transliteration

Symbol expansion (& → and)

Optional stop-word removal

Truncation at word boundaries

Hyphen or underscore separator

How to generate a URL slug

Paste your title

Enter the headline or page title. Accents, punctuation and symbols are all handled.

Choose your options

Hyphens are the standard separator for URLs. Stop-word removal shortens the slug; a length limit truncates it at a word boundary.

Check the notes

The tool tells you what it changed — which characters were transliterated, which words were dropped, where it truncated.

Copy into your CMS

Paste the slug into the permalink field. Decide it before publishing, because changing it later means setting up a redirect.

What makes a good slug

A slug should be readable, short and stable. Readable because it appears in search results, in shared links and in the address bar, and a human-legible URL earns more clicks than a string of IDs. Short because long slugs get truncated in the SERP and are awkward to share.

Stable matters most of all. A URL is a promise: every link pointing at it, every bookmark and every share depends on it continuing to work. Changing a slug after publication breaks all of them unless you set up a 301 redirect, and even then you lose a little authority in the hop.

Hyphens, not underscores

Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners. free-seo-tools is read as three words; free_seo_tools has historically been read closer to a single token. Google has said the difference matters less than it used to, but there is no upside to underscores and a documented downside.

The same logic rules out camelCase and spaces. Spaces become %20 in a URL — ugly, easy to break when copied, and inconsistent across clients. Lowercase with hyphens is the convention for a reason.

Accents, non-Latin scripts and IDNs

URLs can technically carry non-ASCII characters through percent-encoding, so café becomes caf%C3%A9. It works, but the encoded form is what appears when anyone copies the link, and some older systems still mangle it.

Transliterating to ASCII — cafe — keeps the URL readable everywhere. This tool handles the characters that normalisation alone misses: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, ø becomes o, since none of these decompose into a base letter plus an accent.

For a site written entirely in a non-Latin script, transliteration is the wrong call. Native-script URLs are readable to that audience, and Google handles them fine. This tool is built for Latin-script content.

Keywords in slugs: a small factor, not a lever

Having the target keyword in the slug is a minor ranking signal, and Google has repeatedly described words in the URL as a very lightweight factor. What it genuinely helps with is the click: a URL matching the query gets bolded in results and signals relevance to the person scanning.

What actively hurts is stuffing. best-free-seo-tools-top-seo-tools-online-seo-tools-2026 reads as spam to a human and adds nothing for a crawler. Three to five meaningful words is the target — which is what stop-word removal is for, when a natural headline carries too much scaffolding.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?

Hyphens. Google treats them as word separators, while underscores have historically joined words together. Hyphens are also the near-universal convention, so they are what readers and CMS platforms expect.

How long should a URL slug be?

Three to five meaningful words, usually under 60 characters. Long slugs get truncated in search results and are harder to share. The limit is readability, not a technical cap.

Can I change a slug after publishing?

You can, but every existing link to the old URL breaks. If you must change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one and update your internal links. Decide the slug before publishing whenever possible.

Should I remove stop words like "the" and "of"?

Only when the slug is genuinely too long. Removing them can make a slug read awkwardly, and the SEO benefit is negligible. Readability wins over brevity when the two conflict.

What happens to accented characters?

They are transliterated to their closest ASCII equivalent, so café becomes cafe and Müller becomes muller. This keeps the URL readable when copied, since the alternative is percent-encoding like caf%C3%A9.

Do keywords in the URL help rankings?

Slightly. Google has described words in the URL as a very small ranking factor. The real benefit is that a matching URL gets bolded in search results and looks more relevant, which helps click-through. Stuffing keywords into the slug backfires.

Related tools

SEO

Generator

Slug