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Making URL-friendly slugs
A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies a page — the url-friendly-slugs at the end of an address. Good slugs are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated and free of anything a browser or server has to escape. This generator takes a title and returns a clean slug: accents flattened, punctuation stripped, spaces turned into hyphens.
How to use the Slug Generator
- Paste your Source String — usually a page or post title.
- The slug appears immediately.
- Trim it to the meaningful words before publishing.
- Keep slugs stable; changing one breaks every link to that page.
Formula and a worked example
lowercase → strip accents → remove punctuation → spaces to hyphens → collapse repeats
Hyphens are the right separator: search engines treat them as word boundaries, whereas underscores are read as joining characters. Keeping slugs short also keeps them readable in search results, where the URL is displayed.
Worked example
"10 Best Café Recipes for Winter!" becomes 10-best-cafe-recipes-for-winter. Trimming the filler words to best-cafe-recipes-winter is shorter and no less clear.
Frequently asked questions
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so cafe_recipes may be read as one word.
How long should a slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance — three to five meaningful words is usually right. Drop articles and filler.
Should I include the date or an ID?
Only if the content is genuinely time-bound. Dates in slugs make evergreen articles look stale.
Can I change a slug after publishing?
You can, but every existing link breaks. If you must, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one.
Related calculators
Other tools people use alongside the slug generator.