Free Text to Slug Generator

Convert any title, heading or phrase into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug. Choose your separator, case style and options — copy in one click, right in your browser.

Separator
Case
Stop Words
Keep Numbers
Trim to 60
Type or Paste Your Text
Generated Slug
Input words: 0 Slug length: 0 chars Segments: 0 SEO score: –
URL Preview & SEO Checks
https://yoursite.com/blog/your-slug-will-appear-here
Length: –
Separator: –
Lowercase: –
No specials: –
No doubles: –
Clean start/end: –
Batch Slug Converter — Multiple Lines at Once
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Input — one title per line
Generated Slugs
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What This Slug Generator Does

Type or paste any title, heading or phrase into the left panel and the converted slug appears instantly in the right panel — no button press needed. The tool normalises accented characters to their ASCII equivalents, strips special characters, collapses consecutive separators, and removes any leading or trailing separator from the result. The Separator, Case, Stop Words, Keep Numbers and Trim to 60 dropdowns and toggles all update the output in real time as you adjust them.

The URL Preview card below the editor shows exactly how the slug will look at the end of a real web address, alongside six live SEO check badges that tell you whether your slug meets length, separator, casing and keyword-depth best practices. For bulk work, expand the Batch Slug Converter panel to convert an entire list of titles — one per line — using your current settings simultaneously. All conversion happens locally in your browser and nothing is sent to any server.

Tips for Getting the Best Results

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a URL slug and why does it matter for SEO?

A URL slug is the human-readable segment at the end of a web address that identifies a specific page. In https://example.com/blog/how-to-bake-sourdough, the slug is how-to-bake-sourdough. Search engines treat the URL as a lightweight but real ranking signal — a descriptive, keyword-rich slug tells Google what a page covers before it crawls a single word of content. This matters most in competitive niches where on-page signals need to be as strong as possible across every element.

Slugs also affect click-through rate directly. Users scanning search results read the URL alongside the title and meta description before deciding whether to click. A clean slug like /best-noise-cancelling-headphones-2025 reinforces the title's promise and feels trustworthy. A query-string URL like /?p=3847 or an auto-generated ID slug like /product/38471-xkz communicates nothing to either users or search engines and wastes the URL's ranking potential entirely.

How does the slug conversion pipeline work step by step?

The conversion follows a precise sequence. First, the input text is Unicode-normalised using NFD decomposition so that accented characters like é, ä, ñ and ç are broken into their base letter plus combining accent mark. The combining marks are then stripped, leaving plain ASCII equivalents — é becomes e, ä becomes a. Next, any character that is not a letter, digit or space is replaced with the chosen separator character. Consecutive separators produced by punctuation clusters (for example, an em dash surrounded by spaces) are collapsed into a single separator. Any separator left dangling at the start or end of the string is trimmed. Finally, the selected case transformation is applied.

Optional post-processing steps run after the core pipeline. If Remove Stop Words is enabled, tokens that match the stop-word list are dropped before joining. If Keep Numbers is disabled, digits are replaced with spaces before the pipeline runs. If Trim to 60 is enabled, the output is truncated at 60 characters and cut back to the last full segment boundary. The SEO check badges then evaluate the final result against six best-practice rules and display pass, warn or fail states in real time.

What is the best separator for a URL slug?

Hyphens are the right choice for the vast majority of public-facing content URLs. Google's own documentation explicitly states that hyphens act as word separators in URLs, meaning red-canvas-shoes is processed as three distinct keyword tokens — "red", "canvas" and "shoes" — each contributing independently to ranking relevance. This has been confirmed by Google engineers on multiple occasions and is consistent with how search engines have treated hyphens since the early 2000s.

Underscores behave differently: Google treats them as word joiners, so red_canvas_shoes is treated as a single compound term rather than three separate words. For a page targeting the query "canvas shoes", the hyphenated slug ranks more strongly for that phrase because each word is an independent token. Underscores are acceptable in technical documentation, database identifiers and file naming conventions where a hyphen would be ambiguous — but for any URL users will see in a browser or search result, hyphens are universally recommended. Dots are occasionally used in versioned technical documentation (such as release.2.0.notes) but are unusual in content URLs and can confuse CMS routing logic.

Should I remove stop words from my slug?

Stop words — "the", "a", "an", "in", "of", "to", "and", "for" — are common function words that contribute almost no independent SEO value inside a URL. Search engines already understand that a page about "the best ways to improve email open rates" covers email open rates without needing those function words in the URL. Removing them produces a shorter, denser slug: best-ways-improve-email-open-rate versus the-best-ways-to-improve-your-email-open-rate. The first is 39 characters; the second is 48. The first is also easier to share verbally, easier to remember, and less likely to be truncated in a search result display.

There are cases where keeping stop words is the right call. If a stop word is part of a brand name, product name or culturally significant phrase — "The North Face", "to Kill a Mockingbird", "not your average CRM" — removing it changes the meaning or destroys the brand association. Similarly, removing "not" from not-your-typical-agency would leave your-typical-agency, which communicates the opposite of the intended message. Toggle the option on and compare both outputs in the URL Preview card before committing. When in doubt, keep the stop word and shorten the slug in other ways instead.

What is the ideal length for a URL slug?

Most SEO practitioners and official style guides recommend keeping slugs between 10 and 60 characters, aiming for 3 to 5 meaningful keyword-carrying words. Google begins truncating the displayed URL in search results at around 60–70 total characters (including the domain and directory path), so a slug longer than 60 characters risks having its most important keywords cut off in the snippet. Beyond readability, excessively long slugs dilute keyword density: adding low-value words to a slug does not improve ranking and makes the URL harder to type, share or link to.

Shorter is generally better, but a slug that is too short loses descriptive value. A slug of guide or post-1 tells neither users nor search engines anything meaningful about the page. Aim for the minimum number of words that fully and unambiguously describes the page's core topic — typically 3 to 5 words. Enable the "Trim to 60 chars" toggle in this tool to automatically cap output at 60 characters, cutting cleanly at the last full word boundary rather than mid-word. The Length check badge in the SEO Checks panel turns green when your slug is within the ideal range and amber when it is approaching or exceeding the recommended limit.

How does the SEO score work?

The SEO score is a live composite rating based on six individual checks, each representing a widely accepted URL best practice. The tool evaluates: whether the slug length falls within the ideal 10–60 character range; whether hyphens are used as the separator; whether the slug is entirely lowercase; whether the slug contains at least two meaningful keyword-carrying segments; whether it contains three or more such segments for good keyword depth; and whether the slug starts and ends cleanly without a leading or trailing separator character. Each of the first five checks that passes contributes 20 points to the total score.

Checks display in three states: green (pass) means the rule is fully satisfied; amber (warn) means the rule is partially met or represents a minor deviation worth reviewing; red (fail) means the rule is violated and should be fixed before publishing. A score of 100% means all six rules pass simultaneously. In practice, the most common reasons for a non-perfect score are using an underscore or dot separator (which triggers a warn on the separator check), using uppercase case (warn on the lowercase check), or generating a very short slug with fewer than two meaningful keyword words (fail on the keyword checks). Fix red badges first — they represent clear SEO violations rather than stylistic preferences.

Does this tool handle accented and international characters?

Yes. Accented Latin characters — é, è, ê, ë, à, â, ä, ü, ö, ï, ñ, ç, ø, å and similar — are automatically converted to their closest ASCII equivalents before the slug is generated. The conversion uses Unicode NFD normalisation, which decomposes each accented character into its base letter and a combining accent mark. The combining mark is then discarded, leaving only the base letter. This means "Café au Lait Reviews" correctly becomes cafe-au-lait-reviews, "Résumé Writing Tips" becomes resume-writing-tips, and "Jalapeño Recipes" becomes jalapeno-recipes.

This matters practically because many web servers, older browsers, and CMS permalink handlers are inconsistent in how they deal with Unicode characters in URL paths. When a URL contains a non-ASCII character like é, browsers typically percent-encode it as %C3%A9, producing an ugly, unreadable string in the address bar and in any link anchor text. Stripping accents at the slug generation stage prevents this entirely. For text written in non-Latin scripts — Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, Thai, Hebrew — the tool removes most characters since there is no direct ASCII transliteration. For those languages, the recommended approach is to write an English equivalent of the page title and use that as the slug input instead.

Can I generate slugs for multiple titles at once?

Yes. Expand the Batch Slug Converter panel on this page by clicking the "Show" button. Paste one title per line into the left text box — there is no hard limit on the number of lines, though very large batches may take a moment to process. Click "Convert All" and the tool applies your current separator, case, stop-word, keep-numbers and trim settings to every line simultaneously, outputting the slugs in the right box in exactly the same order as the input. Empty lines in the input produce empty lines in the output, preserving the list's visual structure.

Click "Copy Results" to copy the entire slug list to your clipboard in one action, ready to paste into a spreadsheet, CMS import file, or sitemap planning document. The batch converter is especially useful when migrating an existing site with dozens or hundreds of pages, building out a content calendar where you want all slugs decided in advance, or generating category and tag page slugs in bulk for a new site architecture. If your input list contains repeated titles or duplicated entries, clean it first with our Remove Duplicate Lines tool before batch converting.

How is this different from WordPress auto-permalink generation?

WordPress automatically generates a permalink slug from a post title when you first save a draft. The auto-generated result is often longer than ideal, includes all stop words, and is locked in as the canonical URL the moment the post is published — changing it later requires setting up a 301 redirect to avoid broken incoming links, broken social shares, and lost link equity. This tool lets you plan and optimise the slug before you ever open WordPress, so you paste the finished slug directly into the Permalink field (click "Edit" next to the auto-generated one below the title) and publish with a URL that is already fully optimised from day one.

The same workflow applies to any CMS that exposes a manual slug or handle field: Shopify product handles, Webflow CMS collection item slugs, Ghost post URLs, Squarespace page URLs, Contentful entry slugs, and static-site generators like Next.js, Gatsby or Astro that derive file-based URLs from frontmatter slugs. In all of these systems, the auto-generated slug is a starting point, not a recommendation — using this tool to craft the slug deliberately takes 30 seconds and can meaningfully improve the page's long-term search performance.

Should I use numbers in URL slugs?

It depends entirely on whether the number carries permanent, meaningful information or is incidental and likely to become outdated. Numbers that reflect a fixed year, version number, model identifier or product code add genuine value: best-laptops-2025 tells users and search engines that the content covers 2025 models, which is a meaningful keyword signal for users searching with that year in their query. Similarly, iphone-16-pro-review or python-3-12-release-notes both benefit from the number because it is a stable, meaningful part of the page's identity.

Numbers that reflect changeable list lengths are riskier. A slug like 10-tips-for-better-sleep becomes awkward if you later expand the article to 12 tips but cannot change the URL without setting up redirects. In those cases, consider whether the number is essential to the content's identity or just a framing device. If you plan to update the article over time, omitting the number — tips-for-better-sleep — produces a slug that ages better. Toggle "Keep Numbers" off in this tool to see the numberless version instantly and compare both in the URL Preview before deciding.

When should I change a live slug and what do I need to do?

Changing a slug after a page is published is a significant decision that requires careful handling. Every inbound link, social media share, bookmark, and cached search result points to the old URL. Changing the slug without setting up a redirect breaks all of those paths, returning a 404 error to anyone who follows them. Search engines also need time to re-index the new URL and transfer the link equity from the old one, which means rankings can temporarily drop during the transition. For these reasons, slug changes should be treated as a last resort on pages that already have meaningful traffic or inbound links.

When a slug change is genuinely necessary — for example, to fix a significant keyword error, remove a year that is now outdated, or align with a site-wide URL restructure — always implement a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one before or simultaneously with the slug change. Update any internal links pointing to the old URL across the site. Submit the new URL for indexing via Google Search Console. Monitor the old URL in Search Console to confirm the redirect is being followed correctly and that the new URL is being indexed. Never delete the old slug and leave it as a 404 — the 301 redirect is what preserves accumulated link equity during the transition.