Slug Generator

What is a URL Slug?

A URL slug is the part of a web address that comes after the domain name and identifies a specific page in a human-readable format. For example, in the URL example.com/blog/my-first-post, the slug is "my-first-post". Slugs are used to create clean, descriptive, and SEO-friendly URLs that are easy for both users and search engines to understand.

A good slug is lowercase, uses hyphens to separate words, contains only alphanumeric characters, and accurately describes the page content. For instance, "how-to-bake-a-cake" is a great slug because it is readable, descriptive, and contains relevant keywords.

Our slug generator takes any input text, including titles with special characters, spaces, and accented letters, and converts it into a clean, URL-safe slug in real time. You can customize the separator character, toggle lowercase conversion, and enable transliteration to convert accented characters to their ASCII equivalents.

How to Use This Tool

Type or paste your title or text into the input field. The slug is generated in real time as you type, so you can see the result instantly. Use the options below the input to customize the output:

• Separator -- Choose between hyphen (-), underscore (_), or dot (.) as the word separator. Hyphens are the most common choice for web URLs and are recommended by search engines.
• Lowercase -- When enabled, all characters are converted to lowercase. This is the standard for URLs and helps avoid case-sensitivity issues on different servers.
• Transliterate-- When enabled, accented characters like "é", "ü", and "ñ" are converted to their closest ASCII equivalents ("e", "u", "n"). This ensures your slug works correctly across all systems and browsers.

Click the "Copy" button to copy the generated slug to your clipboard, ready to paste into your CMS, code, or URL configuration.

Slug Best Practices

Keep It Short and Descriptive

A slug should be concise yet descriptive. Aim for 3 to 5 words that accurately summarize the page content. Avoid unnecessary words like "a", "an", "the", and "and" unless they are part of a proper noun. Shorter slugs are easier to share, remember, and display in search results.

Use Keywords Strategically

Include your primary keyword near the beginning of the slug. Search engines give more weight to words that appear earlier in the URL. For example, "slug-generator-tool" is better than "free-online-tool-for-generating-slugs" because the key term appears first and the slug is more concise.

Avoid Special Characters

Slugs should contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. Special characters, spaces, and uppercase letters can cause issues with URL encoding and may not work consistently across different browsers and servers. Our tool automatically handles this conversion for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What separator should I use for URLs?

Hyphens (-) are the recommended separator for web URLs. Google officially recommends using hyphens over underscores because hyphens are treated as word separators by search engines, while underscores historically were not. Most modern CMS platforms and frameworks default to hyphens.

What does transliterate mean?

Transliteration converts characters from one script to another. In the context of slugs, it means converting accented characters like "é" to their basic ASCII equivalents like "e". This is important for URLs because many systems do not handle non-ASCII characters well in web addresses.

Can I use this for programming identifiers?

Yes. Select the underscore separator and disable transliteration if you want to create variable or function names from titles. For example, "My First Post" becomes "my_first_post" with underscore separator and lowercase enabled.

Does this tool handle non-Latin scripts?

The transliteration feature handles common Western European accented characters. For non-Latin scripts like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or Cyrillic, the characters will be removed from the slug since they cannot be directly transliterated to ASCII. For those languages, consider using a dedicated transliteration library or writing the slug in a romanized form.