URL slug generator.

What a slug is and why it matters

MDN defines a slug as the unique identifying part of a web address, typically at the end of the URL. In https://example.com/blog/trail-shoe-guide/ the slug is trail-shoe-guide. People read it in the address bar, in shared links and in search results, and Google's URL structure guidance asks for readable words rather than long ID numbers where possible. A slug is not a ranking switch; its job is to describe the page plainly, stay stable, and avoid creating duplicate addresses for the same content.

Exactly what this generator does

The steps are the same every time, in this order:

1. Lowercase the text if "Force lowercase" is ticked.
2. Normalize accented letters to their base letters, so café becomes cafe and crème brûlée becomes creme brulee.
3. Delete every character that is not a letter, digit, space or hyphen. That includes apostrophes, ampersands, underscores, slashes and punctuation, so Don't becomes dont and snake_case becomes snakecase.
4. Turn runs of spaces into single hyphens and split into words.
5. If "Remove common stop words" is ticked, drop the stop words of three letters or fewer from its list: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, has, he, in, is, it, its, of, on, the, to, was. Four-letter entries on the list (from, that, will, with) are kept by this version.
6. If "Limit word count" is ticked, keep only the first N words that remain.

Letters outside the basic Latin alphabet that do not decompose into a base letter, such as Chinese characters, Arabic script or the German sharp s, are removed. If your titles are in such a language, a transliterated slug is still possible but you need to write it by hand, or keep native characters and percent-encode them, which is what Google's documentation recommends for non-ASCII characters in links.

Worked examples

With "Limit word count" ticked and the default of 5 words, the first title shortens to 10-best-trail-shoes-wide. Notice what that cap does: it keeps the first five words after stop words are removed, so the year and the word "guide" drop off. A length limit is a blunt tool, so read the result and re-order your wording if the cut removes the keyword you wanted.

Best-practice rules, and where they come from

• Use hyphens, not underscores. Google's URL structure documentation recommends separating words with hyphens instead of underscores.
• Keep everything lowercase. Google's documentation states that URL handling is case sensitive and gives the example that /APPLE and /apple are treated as distinct URLs. Mixed case therefore invites accidental duplicates, which is why "Force lowercase" is on by default.
• Use readable words. Google asks for descriptive words in place of long ID numbers where possible.
• Avoid unnecessary parameters. Google advises trimming parameters that do not change the content.
• Length. Google's documentation sets no word or character cap for slugs. The "three to five words" advice you will see elsewhere is a widely repeated rule of thumb, not a Google requirement, so choose the shortest slug that still says what the page is.
• Stop words. Removing little words like "the" and "of" makes slugs shorter; it is a style choice, not a requirement. Keep them when removing one changes the meaning, as in a title that depends on "not" or "to".

Common mistakes

• Changing a live slug without a redirect. The old address stops working, and every link and bookmark to it breaks. If you must change a slug, redirect the old URL to the new one permanently.
• Putting the date or a version in the slug for evergreen content, which forces a change every year.
• Stuffing keywords. A slug like best-cheap-trail-shoes-buy-trail-shoes-online reads as spam to people and adds nothing that trail-shoes does not.
• Duplicate slugs. Two pages that generate the same slug collide in most CMS systems. Add a distinguishing word rather than a number if you can.
• Trusting an automatic slug blindly. Always read it once before publishing.

Who this is for and what it does not cover

Use it when you are naming a page, a blog post, a category or a campaign value and want consistent, lowercase, hyphenated text. It does not check whether the slug is already taken on your site, create redirects, translate text, or follow any particular CMS's own slug rules; some systems apply extra normalization of their own. For the page title that goes with the slug, use the Title Tag Checker, and for making consistent campaign values see the UTM Link Builder.