Toolphy

URL Slug Generator

Type or paste a title to instantly get a clean, lowercase, SEO-friendly URL slug with your preferred separator and options.

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How to Generate a URL Slug

Turn any headline, product name, or sentence into a clean, search-friendly URL slug in a few seconds. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

  1. Type or paste your text. Enter the title you want to convert in the input box. The slug recalculates on every keystroke, so you can experiment with different wording without pressing a button.

    Example: Pasting "Café Crème & 10 Délicieux Croissants!" produces "cafe-creme-10-delicieux-croissants".

  2. Choose your separator. Pick a hyphen ( - ) or an underscore ( _ ) as the word separator. Hyphens are the standard for web addresses because search engines treat them as spaces between words, while underscores are better suited to programming identifiers and file names.

  3. Decide how to handle stop words. Enable the option to remove common filler words such as the, and, of, and a. Keeping them improves readability for long descriptive phrases; removing them produces shorter, denser slugs that save space in the address bar.

  4. Pick the letter case. Lowercase is the web convention and avoids case-sensitivity problems on some servers. Uppercase is useful when the slug becomes a constant in code, and the preserve option keeps whatever capitalisation you typed.

    Pro tip: Keep slugs under roughly 60 characters and place the most important keyword near the beginning, because readers and search engines scan the start of a URL first.

What Is a URL Slug?

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. In the address "https://example.com/blog/choosing-a-camera", the slug is "choosing-a-camera". It is the final segment after the last slash and is built from the words of the page title rather than from a database identifier. A well-written slug tells both people and search engines what the page contains before it is even opened. A good slug contains only lowercase letters, digits, and single separators between words. Spaces are never allowed in a URL, so they must be replaced by a hyphen or an underscore. Accented characters such as "é", "ü", or "ñ" are technically permitted in modern addresses, but they get percent-encoded into long, ugly sequences like "%C3%A9", which break sharing and analytics. This is why the standard approach is to decompose accented letters into their plain ASCII equivalents: "é" becomes "e", "ü" becomes "u", and "ñ" becomes "n". The tool performs this normalisation automatically using Unicode decomposition. Punctuation such as commas, apostrophes, question marks, and ampersands is removed entirely or converted into the separator. Stop words — short, low-meaning words such as "the", "and", "of", or "a" — are often dropped to shorten the slug without losing meaning. Finally, collapsing repeated separators and trimming them from both ends keeps the address tidy. The result is a short, stable, readable identifier that is easy to type, share, and remember.

Common Applications

1. Blogging and content management: A writer publishes an article titled "10 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Website". The slug generator turns it into "10-easy-ways-to-speed-up-your-website", a clean permalink that matches the content and reads well in search results.

2. E-commerce product pages: A store with the product "Café Crème Gourmet — 500g" needs a stable product URL. The tool strips the accent from "café" and the em dash, producing "cafe-creme-gourmet-500g" for a reliable, shareable link.

3. Local business and SEO pages: A marketing team building city landing pages converts "Plumbing Services in New York" into "plumbing-services-in-new-york" to keep the keyword in the address and reinforce relevance.

4. Developer tooling: Engineers generating file names, CSS classes, database keys, or feature flags often prefer underscores. Switching the separator to underscore gives "user_profile_settings", valid in most programming languages.

5. Analytics and campaign tracking: Clean slugs make reports readable. Instead of blocks of percent-encoded characters, you see meaningful path segments that are easy to group and filter in dashboards.

How Accents and Unicode Are Handled

The generator normalises text to its decomposed Unicode form and then removes the combining accent marks. This converts "é" to "e", "ö" to "o", "ç" to "c", and "ñ" to "n" while preserving the underlying letter. Because this step happens before punctuation removal, accents never survive as percent-encoded fragments, so every slug stays ASCII-safe and consistent across servers, browsers, and analytics tools.

Stop Words and SEO Best Practices

Stop words are the short, high-frequency words that carry little specific meaning: "the", "a", "and", "of", "to", "in". Removing them shortens a slug and concentrates the keywords, which can slightly help relevance. However, removing them can also make a phrase harder to read. A balanced rule is to keep stop words in short, descriptive titles and remove them from long sentences. A slug of three to five meaningful words is usually the sweet spot.

Guides

Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ

Is my text sent to a server?

No. The entire conversion happens locally in your browser. Your text never leaves your device and is never uploaded anywhere.

How are accented letters like é handled?

They are decomposed using Unicode normalisation and then stripped of their accent. "é" becomes "e", "ü" becomes "u", "ç" becomes "c", and "ñ" becomes "n", so the slug stays ASCII-safe.

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Use hyphens for normal web pages: search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator. Use underscores when the value is a developer identifier, such as a file name, CSS class, or database key.

What are stop words and should I remove them?

Stop words are common filler words such as "the", "and", "of", and "a". Removing them shortens the slug and concentrates the keywords, but keeping them can improve readability for long descriptive phrases.

Is there a length limit for the slug?

There is no hard limit in the tool, but aim for under about 60 characters. Short slugs are easier to read, share, and fit into search result snippets without being truncated.

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