URL Slug Generator
Create a short lowercase URL slug from a page title. Choose hyphens or underscores and copy the result into a route or content system.
Runs locally in your browser
Accents are simplified and characters outside Latin letters and digits are removed.
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What is the URL Slug Generator?
Create a short lowercase URL slug from a page title. Choose hyphens or underscores and copy the result into a route or content system.
How to use it
- 1Enter a title or phrase.
- 2Choose the word separator.
- 3Copy the generated slug.
How it works
The title is normalized to separate common accents, lowercased, and runs of punctuation or whitespace become one separator. Leading and trailing separators are removed.
Title to route
“A Quick Guide to Café Tools!” becomes “a-quick-guide-to-cafe-tools”.
Limitations & notes
- Non-Latin scripts are removed by this simple ASCII slug rule.
- Changing a published slug can require a redirect to preserve existing links.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a good URL slug for SEO?
Short, readable and descriptive. Google's own guidance favors URLs with words people understand, separated by hyphens rather than underscores, because hyphens are treated as word separators. Aim for three to six meaningful words, such as how-to-reset-router instead of the full headline. Leave out dates if the content will be updated, and avoid changing a slug after it is indexed unless you add a 301 redirect from the old address.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?
Use hyphens for public web pages. Search engines read a hyphen as a space between words, while an underscore can join words together, so red_running_shoes may be read as one token. Underscores are still common in file names, database keys, Python identifiers and some API routes, which is why this tool offers both. Pick one style per site and keep it consistent.
What happens to accents, symbols and apostrophes?
Accented letters are reduced to their base letter, so Café becomes cafe and Ñandú becomes nandu. Every other character outside a to z and 0 to 9 becomes a separator, and runs of them collapse into one. That means Don't Panic becomes don-t-panic, Salt & Pepper becomes salt-pepper, and the German ß or Danish ø are dropped as breaks: Straße turns into stra-e. Edit those words by hand, for example to strasse, before generating.
Can I make slugs for titles in Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic?
Not with this tool. It produces ASCII-only slugs, so a title written entirely in a non-Latin script returns an empty result. Browsers and search engines do support Unicode paths, which are percent-encoded on the wire, and many sites use them. If you need an ASCII slug for such a title, write a short transliterated or translated version first, for example moscow-guide for a Russian heading, and convert that.
Is a slug the same as URL encoding?
No. URL encoding keeps every character and replaces unsafe ones with percent codes, so a title with spaces becomes My%20Title. A slug rewrites the text into a simplified, lowercase form that needs no encoding at all, like my-title, and it deliberately throws away punctuation. Use a slug for page addresses you design yourself, and URL encoding when you must pass arbitrary text, such as a search term, inside a query string.
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