URL Slug Generator

What makes a good slug

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL after the domain. It is a small thing that several other things depend on.

Hyphens, not underscores. Google has been explicit that hyphens separate words and underscores do not, so json_to_yaml reads as one token while json-to-yaml reads as three. This is one of the few places where a formatting choice has a documented effect.

Short, but not cryptic. Three to five meaningful words is the usual sweet spot. Long slugs get truncated in search results and are awkward to share; over-shortened ones lose the descriptive value that makes someone confident about clicking.

Descriptive of the page, not of your site structure. /json-to-yaml-converter tells a reader what they will find. /tools/category/4/item/1823 does not.

Stable. This matters more than any of the above. Changing a slug breaks every existing link unless you add a redirect, and even with a redirect there is some dilution. Get it right before publishing, and leave it alone afterwards unless the page's subject has genuinely changed.

Accents, other scripts, and what to do with them

Modern browsers and search engines handle non-ASCII URLs correctly, so a slug in Arabic or Chinese script is technically fine and is indexed normally. The practical problems appear elsewhere: the URL gets percent-encoded when copied, turning a clean address into a wall of %D8%A7%D9%84; some older systems mangle it; and it becomes hard to dictate or type.

The common compromise is transliteration — converting to the nearest ASCII equivalent, so Zoë Müller becomes zoe-muller and Привет becomes privet. That keeps the slug readable to a Latin-alphabet reader and safe everywhere, which is why most CMS platforms do it by default. This tool transliterates accented Latin, German (with ü to ue where that convention applies), Cyrillic and Greek.

If your audience reads the script natively, keeping it is a reasonable choice and does no SEO harm. If your audience is mixed or international, transliterate. The one thing to avoid is stripping the characters entirely, which turns a meaningful title into an empty or nonsensical slug.

Stop words, dates, and other decisions

Stop words. Removing the, a, and, of shortens slugs without losing meaning most of the time. But sometimes they carry the meaning: the-office is not office, and how-to-x loses something as x. Use the option, then read the result before accepting it.

Dates and numbers in the URL. /2026/09/my-post signals that a post is from September 2026 forever. For news that is appropriate. For evergreen content it is actively harmful — the URL makes the article look stale even after you update it, which depresses clicks. Prefer a flat slug for anything you intend to keep current.

Stop words in a different sense: filler. Words like ultimate, complete and best in a slug add length and say nothing. They belong in the title, where they may earn a click, not in the URL.

Duplicates. Two pages cannot share a slug. Bulk mode flags collisions so you can resolve them before they become a CMS error or, worse, an accidental overwrite.

How to use the URL Slug Generator

1. Paste your title

   A single title, or switch to bulk mode and paste a whole list, one per line.

2. Choose your options

   Hyphen separator is recommended. Stop-word removal and a length cap are optional and worth reviewing case by case.

3. Check the result reads well

   A slug should still make sense to a person. If removing stop words has made it ambiguous, turn the option off for that one.

4. Copy it into your CMS

   Set it before publishing. Changing a slug afterwards breaks existing links unless you add a redirect.

Frequently asked questions