Slug Generator
Type a title — the URL-safe slug appears instantly.
What the generator actually does
A slug is the human-readable tail of a URL, and good ones follow a strict recipe. This tool applies it in order: lowercase everything; decompose accented letters and strip the accents (é → e, ü → u) so the slug is plain ASCII; spell out & as "and" — dropping it silently would merge unrelated words; replace every run of anything that isn't a–z or 0–9 with a single hyphen, so spaces, punctuation, em dashes, and apostrophes all collapse cleanly; and finally trim any leading or trailing hyphens. The result is stable, readable, and safe in every browser, CMS, and sitemap without percent-encoding.
One consequence worth knowing: apostrophes are separators too, so
you'll becomes you-ll. Some publishers prefer
deleting the apostrophe instead (youll) — both are
valid; consistency across your site matters more than the choice.
Worked example
Input: Écoute — 10 Cafés & Bars You'll Love!
Output: ecoute-10-cafes-and-bars-you-ll-love (36
characters). The É lost its accent, the em dash became an ordinary
hyphen, the ampersand turned into "and", and the trailing
exclamation mark disappeared entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Why hyphens instead of underscores in URLs?
Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator, so blue-widgets is read as two words. Underscores historically joined words into one token (blue_widgets ≈ bluewidgets), and they're harder to see in underlined links. Hyphens are the settled convention for web slugs; save underscores for code identifiers.
Do accented characters break URLs?
They don't break them — browsers percent-encode non-ASCII characters, so /café/ becomes /caf%C3%A9/ on the wire. But percent-encoded slugs look unreadable when shared and are easy to mistype. Transliterating instead (café → cafe), as this tool does by stripping accents, keeps the slug readable, copy-paste-safe, and stable across systems.
How long should a URL slug be?
Short and keyword-bearing beats exhaustive. Three to six meaningful words is a good target — enough to describe the page, short enough to read in a search result or a pasted link. Slugs are permanent once published, so prefer wording that will still make sense if you later retitle the page.
Should I remove stop words like 'the' and 'of' from slugs?
It's a trade-off, and this tool deliberately doesn't do it automatically. Dropping stop words shortens slugs (how-to-tie-a-tie → tie-a-tie loses meaning, though), while keeping them preserves readability. Modern search engines handle both fine — edit the generated slug by hand if a stop word adds nothing.