URL Slug Generator

What makes a good slug

• Lowercase. Some servers treat URLs as case-sensitive, so mixed case creates duplicate-address problems for no benefit.
• Hyphens, not underscores or spaces. Spaces become %20, which is ugly and breaks when pasted.
• Three to five words. Descriptive without sprawling.
• Readable on its own. Someone should be able to guess the page content from the slug alone.
• Stable. Changing it later breaks every existing link.
• ASCII only. Accented and non-Latin characters get percent-encoded into unreadable strings when copied.

Hyphens versus underscores

This is settled, and the reason is specific rather than aesthetic. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner. So annual-report is understood as two words, while annual_report may be read as the single token "annual_report".

There's a practical reason too: URLs are commonly underlined in links, and an underscore disappears into the underline. Hyphens survive.

Accents and non-Latin characters

"Café" in a URL becomes caf%C3%A9 once encoded, which is unreadable when shared and awkward to type. This tool flattens accents to their base letters, é becomes e, ü becomes u, ñ becomes n. Which keeps the slug legible.

For non-Latin scripts, browsers now display internationalised URLs correctly in the address bar, so a Hindi or Arabic slug can be perfectly good for a Hindi or Arabic audience. It's still worth knowing that it percent-encodes when copied into plain text.

Stop words: it depends

Removing "a", "the", "of", "and" and similar shortens a slug and rarely loses meaning. the-complete-guide-to-fixing-a-leaking-tap becomes complete-guide-fixing-leaking-tap, which is shorter and just as clear.

But it depends on the title. Strip stop words from "The Who" and you have nothing. From "War of the Worlds" you get war-worlds. The toggle is off by default because this is a judgement call, not a rule.

Once it's live, leave it alone

Changing a published slug breaks every link to that page, from other sites, from social posts, from someone's bookmarks, from search results until they're recrawled.

If you must change one, set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. That preserves most of the accumulated link value and stops visitors hitting a 404. Without a redirect, you're starting that page from scratch.

Which is a good argument for spending the extra thirty seconds getting it right at publication.

Common mistakes

• Dates that will age badly. best-tools-2026 looks stale in January.
• Keyword stuffing. cheap-best-top-tools-online-free reads as spam to humans and search engines alike.
• Auto-generated IDs. /post/48219 tells nobody anything.
• The whole title. A 90-character slug gets truncated everywhere it appears.
• Trailing punctuation. Stray hyphens at either end from stripped punctuation.