URL Slug Generator

What makes a good slug

A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies the page. It should be lowercase, use hyphens between words, contain only unreserved characters, and describe the page in as few words as carry the meaning.

Hyphens rather than underscores, because search engines have long treated the hyphen as a word separator and the underscore as a joiner, so json-formatter reads as two words while json_formatter may read as one. Lowercase, because paths are case sensitive on most servers and mixed case invites two URLs serving one page.

Transliteration, not deletion

Accented and non-Latin characters are legal in URLs when percent-encoded, but the encoded form is unreadable and awkward to share. The usual handling is to strip them, which turns "Café Culture in Zürich" into a slug missing letters.

This generator decomposes accented characters and keeps the base letter, so you get cafe-culture-in-zurich. Characters that have no base letter, such as the German sharp s or the Nordic slashed o, are mapped to their conventional Latin equivalents, giving ss and o. An ampersand becomes the word "and" rather than disappearing.

Stop words

Removing words like "the", "of" and "in" shortens a slug, and the option is here because plenty of teams want it. It is not an SEO gain: search engines handle stop words fine and there is no ranking benefit to removing them.

Use it when a title is genuinely long and the shorter form still reads naturally. Do not use it when removal changes meaning. "How to Get Rid of Ants" becomes "get-rid-ants", which is fine, but there are plenty of cases where dropping a preposition makes a slug read as gibberish. The option is left off by default for that reason, and it never removes so many words that fewer than two remain.

Length

There is no hard limit, but shorter is better for sharing, for display in search results, and for anyone typing a URL by hand. Around 60 characters is a sensible ceiling. Truncation here happens at a word boundary rather than mid-word, so a shortened slug still reads as words.

Duplicates and changing slugs

Paste a batch of titles and the tool flags any two that produce the same slug, which happens more often than expected with titles differing only in punctuation or stop words. Two pages cannot share a URL, so these need disambiguating before publication rather than after.

Once a URL is published, changing it costs you the links and rankings the old one accumulated unless you add a permanent redirect from old to new. Getting the slug right before publishing is much cheaper than fixing it later, which is the main argument for generating slugs deliberately rather than letting a content system derive one from a title that may still change.

Questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Search engines treat the hyphen as a word separator and have historically treated the underscore as a joiner, so json-formatter reads as two words while json_formatter may read as one.

What happens to accented characters?

They are transliterated to their base Latin letters, so Zürich becomes zurich rather than losing the character. Letters without a base form, such as the German sharp s, map to conventional equivalents like ss.

Does removing stop words help SEO?

No. Search engines handle stop words without difficulty and there is no ranking benefit. Remove them only when a title is genuinely long and the shorter slug still reads naturally.

How long should a slug be?

There is no hard limit, but around 60 characters is a good ceiling for readability and sharing. Truncation here happens at a word boundary so the result still reads as words.

Can I change a slug after publishing?

You can, but the old URL loses its accumulated links and rankings unless you add a permanent redirect from the old path to the new one. It is far cheaper to settle the slug before publishing.