URL Slug Generator

How to Generate a URL Slug

A slug is the last piece of a web address, the part after the domain that names one specific page. In textsorter.com/slug-generator, "slug-generator" is the slug. Turning a title into a good one used to mean typing it out by hand and second-guessing every capital letter and apostrophe. This tool does that work the instant you paste text, so the slug is ready before you have finished reading it back.

1. Paste your title. Drop a blog post headline, a product name, a page title, or any other phrase into the input box. You can paste from a CMS draft, a spreadsheet of product names, a notes app, or type fresh.
2. Pick a separator. Hyphens are the standard choice and what almost every CMS generates automatically, but some legacy systems and internal tools expect underscores instead. Switch the radio button and the slug updates immediately.
3. Decide on casing. Lowercase is the default and the safe choice, since some servers treat "About-Us" and "about-us" as two different pages. Turn the option off only if a specific platform requires mixed case.
4. Copy the result. Click "Copy Slug" and paste it straight into your CMS permalink field, your static site's front matter, or your app's routing config.

Everything happens as you type, with no submit button and no delay. The conversion runs in a few milliseconds on your own device, so pasting a single title or working through a spreadsheet of fifty product names one at a time feels equally instant.

Why URL Slugs Matter for SEO

A URL is one of the few pieces of a webpage that shows up in three places at once: the browser address bar, the search results snippet, and any link someone shares on social media or in an email. A slug like /best-espresso-machines-2026 tells a reader and a search engine exactly what the page covers before either one loads a single word of the actual content. A slug like /p?id=48291&cat=7 tells them nothing.

Search engines use the words in a slug as a ranking signal, alongside the page title, headings, and body content. It is a smaller signal than it used to be a decade ago, but it still matters, especially for competitive queries where every advantage counts. More importantly, a clean slug shapes how a human reader behaves. When someone scans search results, a URL that plainly states the topic reads as trustworthy, while a URL full of random characters or tracking parameters reads as suspicious or, at best, unfinished. That perception alone measurably affects click-through rate.

Slugs also matter for the people maintaining the site long after the SEO benefit is priced in. A folder of pages named /post-1, /post-2, and /post-3 tells an editor nothing about what is actually published. A folder named by topic lets anyone on the team scan a sitemap or an analytics dashboard and immediately know which page is which, without opening a single one of them.

Slug Formatting Rules Explained

The transformation from a raw title to a clean slug follows a small, consistent set of rules. Knowing them means you can predict exactly what the tool will output before you even paste anything.

Two details are worth remembering. First, digits are always preserved, since a year, a model number, or a quantity is often part of what makes a title specific. Second, punctuation that carries meaning in prose, like a question mark or an ampersand, carries no meaning in a URL and is dropped rather than encoded, since encoded punctuation only makes an address harder to read and share.

Accented Characters and Non-Latin Scripts: What Actually Happens

This is the part of slug generation that trips people up most, because the rules are not the same for every writing system, and a title that looks completely ordinary in your own language can produce a slug missing a letter you needed.

For most Latin-alphabet accents, the conversion is clean. Letters like é, è, ê, ñ, ü, ç, and å are built, at the character-encoding level, from a plain base letter plus a separate accent mark. The tool splits the two apart and drops only the accent mark, so café becomes cafe, año becomes ano, and garçon becomes garcon. This covers the overwhelming majority of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, and Central European text without losing any meaning.

A handful of Latin letters do not work this way, because they are not built from a base letter plus an accent mark at all, they are their own distinct letter. The German ß, the Scandinavian ø and æ, the Polish ł, and the Turkish dotless ı all fall into this group. Since there is no accent to strip, the tool removes the letter outright rather than guessing at a replacement, which means straße becomes strae instead of the more familiar strasse, and grønt becomes grnt instead of groent. If your title depends on one of these letters to stay readable, check the output and fix it by hand before publishing.

Non-Latin scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic, are removed entirely rather than transliterated. A title written purely in Arabic or Chinese will generate an empty or near-empty slug, because the tool only recognizes plain ASCII letters, digits, and your chosen separator as valid slug characters. This matches how the biggest CMS platforms, including WordPress and Shopify, behave by default, and it matches long-standing web convention: URLs are expected to stay ASCII-safe so they render correctly and can be typed, copied, and shared reliably across every browser, messaging app, and printed page, regardless of what script the visible page content is written in. The practical fix is straightforward: type a short English or transliterated working title into the box for the slug alone, and keep your visible page title, headings, and content in whatever script your audience reads.

This Tool vs. Your CMS's Auto-Generated Slug

Most content platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, Ghost, and static site generators like Hugo or Astro, already generate a slug automatically from whatever title you type. That built-in behavior is convenient, but it is not always what you want, and the differences are exactly where a dedicated tool earns its place.

• Preview before you commit. A CMS usually generates the slug only after you have already saved or partially published the page, and changing it afterward means dealing with a redirect. This tool lets you see and adjust the result before anything goes live.
• Consistent behavior across platforms. If you publish the same content to a WordPress blog, a Shopify product page, and an internal wiki, each platform's auto-slug logic can produce slightly different results for the same title. Generating the slug once here and pasting it everywhere keeps it identical across all three.
• Control over the separator. Most CMS platforms default to hyphens, which is the right call, but some legacy systems, internal tools, or specific frameworks expect underscores. Switching that here takes one click instead of a settings hunt.
• Batch and pre-planning work. Content planners, migration projects, and anyone mapping out a site's URL structure before a single page exists can generate a whole list of slugs ahead of time, independent of any specific CMS.

None of this replaces your CMS's own slug field. It is meant to sit alongside it, giving you a fast, predictable, and portable way to work out exactly what a slug should be before you commit to it anywhere.

Common Ways People Use This Slug Generator

Blog posts and articles

A blog publishing several posts a week benefits the most from consistency. Running every new headline through the same tool means every post follows the same casing, the same separator, and the same accent-handling rules, instead of drifting slightly depending on who wrote the title that week.

Ecommerce product pages

Product names are often the messiest source text a store owner deals with: model numbers, size variants, trademark symbols, and marketing punctuation all mixed together. Turning "Ultra-Light Runner™ (Men's, Size 10)" into a clean, predictable slug up front avoids duplicate or broken product URLs across a catalog of thousands of items.

Documentation and knowledge bases

Technical docs sites often mirror a folder structure in their URLs. Keeping every page slug short, lowercase, and hyphenated makes the resulting site map easy to scan and easy to link to from other pages, commit messages, or support tickets.

Landing pages and campaigns

A marketing campaign often needs a URL that is easy to say out loud, print on a flyer, or read off a slide. A short, clean slug like /spring-sale is far easier to remember and retype correctly than anything auto-generated from a long campaign title.

Site migrations and redesigns

When a site moves to a new CMS or a new URL structure, someone has to decide what every old page's new address will be. Running an entire spreadsheet of old titles through a consistent slug process, one row at a time, produces a clean, predictable redirect map instead of a patchwork of manually typed guesses.

Common Slug Mistakes to Avoid

• Stuffing in every keyword. A slug like /best-cheap-affordable-budget-running-shoes-2026-review reads as spam to both readers and search engines. Pick the two or three words that actually describe the page and stop there.
• Leaving stop words in for very long titles. Words like "a," "the," "of," and "and" rarely need to survive into the slug. Dropping them keeps the URL shorter without losing any meaning, though it is fine to keep one where removing it would make the phrase read strangely.
• Baking a date into an evergreen page. A slug like /2023-guide-to-seo looks stale the moment the calendar turns over, even if the content itself gets updated regularly. Save the date for genuinely time-bound content, like an event page or a dated news post.
• Changing a slug after it has been indexed. Once a page has search traffic, backlinks, or bookmarks pointing at it, changing the slug without a 301 redirect breaks every one of those. If a slug truly needs to change, redirect the old address to the new one rather than letting visitors hit a dead page.
• Mixing separators across a site. Some pages with hyphens and others with underscores makes a site's URL structure look accidental rather than designed. Pick one separator, almost always the hyphen, and use it everywhere.

Most of these mistakes are easy to avoid simply by deciding on a slug convention once, generating every slug the same way after that, and treating a published slug as close to permanent.

Privacy: Everything Happens in Your Browser

The conversion from title to slug runs as JavaScript inside the page you are looking at right now. Nothing you paste into the input box is sent to a server, logged anywhere, or stored once you close the tab. That matters more than it might seem, since the text people paste into a slug generator is often an unpublished draft, an internal project codename, an unreleased product name, or client work still under wraps.

There is no artificial limit on how much you can paste, either, since the entire process runs on your own device rather than through a rate-limited API. Whether you are generating one slug or working through a long list one line at a time, the tool responds at the same speed: instantly.

Frequently Asked Questions

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🔒 100% Client-Side Privacy

Every slug is generated <strong>entirely in your browser</strong>. No text is uploaded to any server. Your titles and drafts stay on your device.