URL Slug Generator
Turn headlines into clean, SEO-friendly URL slugs — one at a time or in bulk.
Short, hyphenated, lowercase slugs read best in search results and are the safest across servers and social platforms. Once a page is live, changing its slug breaks existing links unless you add a redirect.
Turn a title into a clean URL slug — lowercase, hyphen-separated, accents folded down to plain ASCII, punctuation and stop words removed — the format that reads well in a browser bar and survives being pasted anywhere.
It's the small formatting job that sits between writing a headline and publishing a page, and getting it right the first time matters more than most, because changing a slug later breaks every existing link to it.
What makes a good slug
| Title | Good slug | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| How to Bake Sourdough Bread at Home | bake-sourdough-bread | how-to-bake-sourdough-bread-at-home-2026 |
| 10 Tips for Café Owners | tips-for-cafe-owners | 10-tips-for-caf%C3%A9-owners |
| What's New in v2.0? | whats-new-in-v2-0 | what's-new-in-v2.0? |
| Q&A: Our CTO on Remote Work | qa-cto-remote-work | q&a:-our-cto-on-remote-work |
Rules worth following
- Hyphens, not underscores. Search engines have long treated hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners.
- Lowercase only. Some servers treat URLs case-sensitively, so /About and /about can become two pages with duplicate content.
- Three to five meaningful words. Long slugs get truncated in search results and are painful to read aloud or type.
- Drop stop words — a, the, of, for — unless removing one changes the meaning.
- Never put a date or year in a slug for evergreen content. You'll either update the content and leave a stale year, or change the URL and break links.
- Fold accents to ASCII. A percent-encoded URL is ugly when pasted and can break in older systems.
- Avoid sequential numbers as the whole slug. /post/1234 tells a reader and a search engine nothing.
Changing a slug after publishing
A published URL is a promise. Changing it breaks inbound links, bookmarks, and any accumulated search ranking that pointed at the old address. If you must change one, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one and leave it in place permanently — not for a few months.
The corollary is to think about the slug before publishing rather than after. It costs nothing to get right at the start and is never entirely free to fix afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
- Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?
- Hyphens. Search engines treat them as word separators and underscores as word joiners, so 'sourdough_bread' can be read as a single token while 'sourdough-bread' is two indexable words.
- How long should a URL slug be?
- Three to five meaningful words is a good target. Long slugs get truncated in search results and are awkward to share verbally or type by hand.
- Should I remove stop words like 'the' and 'of'?
- Usually yes — they add length without adding meaning. Keep them where removing one would make the slug ambiguous or read strangely.
- What happens if I change a slug after publishing?
- Every existing link to the old URL breaks, including bookmarks and inbound links. Add a permanent 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one and leave it in place indefinitely.
- Can slugs contain non-English characters?
- Technically yes, via percent-encoding or internationalised URLs, and it can be the right choice for a non-English audience. Be aware the encoded form looks messy when pasted and some older systems mishandle it.
- Should the slug match the page title exactly?
- No. The title is written for a human scanning results; the slug should be a shortened, keyword-focused version of it. Matching exactly usually makes the slug too long.