How to generate a URL slug
- Type or paste a title into the left box, or a whole list of them, one title per line. The slugs appear on the right live as you type.
- Keep the default hyphen separator for web URLs, and leave lowercase ticked for standard SEO slugs; switch to underscores or uppercase only if a particular system demands it.
- Click Copy output and paste the slugs into your CMS, static-site router, redirect map or a spreadsheet column. Use Sample to see accented and punctuated titles handled, or Clear to reset.
A slug is the tail end of a URL, the my-first-post in example.com/blog/my-first-post, and it does quiet but real work. It tells a reader what a page is before they click, it survives being pasted into a chat or email where the link text is all anyone sees, and it gives search engines a clean, keyword-bearing signal about the page's topic. A blog editor publishing three posts a day, a shop owner naming hundreds of product pages, and a developer wiring up routes in a framework all need the same thing: a title reliably turned into something a URL bar will accept without complaint.
Doing this by hand is where mistakes creep in, a stray capital, a smart quote, an em dash, an accented character that a CMS silently mangles into %C3%A9. The batch box exists precisely for the bulk jobs: paste an export of old post titles or a column of SKUs, one per line, and get back a matching list of slugs you can drop straight into an import file.
What makes a good slug
A slug is the part of the URL readers and search engines actually parse for meaning. The rules this generator applies are the ones Google's own guidance implies: lowercase everything (paths are case-sensitive on many servers, and mixed case invites duplicate-content headaches), separate words with hyphens (Google reads them as spaces; underscores are treated as word-joiners), transliterate accents to plain ASCII so links survive copy-paste through every system, and drop apostrophes entirely so don't becomes dont rather than don-t. Everything else, emoji, punctuation, symbols, collapses into a single separator, with no leading or trailing dashes and no doubled-up hyphens left behind. Aim for three to five meaningful words and trim filler like the and of; a short, specific slug is easier to read, remember and share than a full sentence stretched across the address bar.
Frequently asked questions
What is a URL slug?
The human-readable page identifier in a URL, like my-first-post in example.com/blog/my-first-post. Good slugs are lowercase, hyphenated, and made of letters and numbers only, so they stay readable and shareable.
Should slugs use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens, Google treats them as word separators, while underscored words may be read as one token. Use underscores only when a system requires them, such as some database keys or filenames.
What happens to accents and special characters?
Accents transliterate to plain ASCII (é → e), apostrophes are removed (don't → dont), and every other symbol becomes a separator, leaving a result safe for any URL, filename or CMS.
Can I convert many titles at once?
Yes, one title per line in, one slug per line out, ready for a spreadsheet or a bulk CMS import. It is the fastest way to slugify a backlog of posts or product names.
How long should a URL slug be?
Short and specific. Three to five meaningful words is a good target, long enough to describe the page, short enough to read at a glance. You can safely drop filler words like a, the and of, since they add length without adding meaning.
Will changing a slug break existing links?
Yes. Once a page is published and linked to, editing its slug changes its URL and breaks every old link and bookmark unless you add a redirect from the old address to the new one. Settle on a slug before you publish, and redirect afterwards if you ever must change it.