Slug Generator

About Slug Generator

What Makes a Good URL Slug?

Rule	Good Example	Bad Example	Why It Matters
Use lowercase only	/best-running-shoes	/Best-Running-Shoes	URLs are case-sensitive on most servers - mixed case causes duplicate content
Use hyphens, not underscores	/best-running-shoes	/best_running_shoes	Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as joiners
Keep it short (3-5 words)	/running-shoe-guide	/the-ultimate-complete-guide-to-buying-running-shoes-in-2026	Shorter slugs are easier to share, read, and remember
Include the primary keyword	/mortgage-calculator	/tool-number-47	Search engines use the slug as a relevance signal
No special characters	/cafe-menu	/café-menu	Accented characters get percent-encoded, making URLs ugly and hard to share
No stop words (optional)	/running-shoe-guide	/a-guide-to-the-best-running-shoes	Removing "a", "the", "to" makes slugs more compact

How This Generator Works

The slug generator applies the following transformations in order:

Step	What Happens	Example
1. Trim whitespace	Removes leading and trailing spaces	" Hello World " becomes "Hello World"
2. Transliterate accents	Converts accented characters to ASCII equivalents using Unicode decomposition	"über café" becomes "uber cafe"
3. Lowercase	Converts all characters to lowercase	"Hello World" becomes "hello world"
4. Strip special characters	Removes everything that is not a letter, number, space, or separator	"Hello, World!" becomes "hello world"
5. Replace spaces	Replaces spaces (and runs of spaces) with the chosen separator	"hello world" becomes "hello-world"
6. Collapse separators	Removes duplicate consecutive hyphens or underscores	"hello---world" becomes "hello-world"
7. Trim separators	Removes leading and trailing hyphens/underscores	"-hello-world-" becomes "hello-world"
8. Enforce length limit	Truncates at a word boundary if a max length is set	"hello-world-example" (max 11) becomes "hello-world"

Accented Character Transliteration

URLs technically support accented characters through percent-encoding (e.g., %C3%A9 for "e" with an accent), but this makes links ugly and difficult to share. The generator transliterates common accented characters to their closest ASCII equivalents:

Original	Transliterated	Language Context
e with accent (acute, grave, circumflex)	e	French, Portuguese, Italian
n with tilde	n	Spanish
u with umlaut	u	German, Turkish
o with stroke	o	Danish, Norwegian
c with cedilla	c	French, Portuguese, Turkish
a with ring	a	Swedish, Danish, Norwegian
sharp s (Eszett)	ss	German

Hyphens vs Underscores in URLs

Google's official recommendation is to use hyphens. In a 2011 blog post, Matt Cutts (then head of Google's webspam team) explained that Google treats hyphens as word separators but treats underscores as word joiners. That means running-shoes is interpreted as two words ("running" and "shoes") while running_shoes is treated as one word ("running_shoes").

Separator	How Google Reads It	When to Use
Hyphen (-)	Word separator	URLs, blog posts, page slugs - the default for the web
Underscore (_)	Word joiner	File names, Python modules, database tables

This tool defaults to hyphens but offers underscores as an option for non-URL use cases.

Slug Conventions by Platform

Platform	Slug Format	Max Length	Notes
WordPress	lowercase, hyphens	200 chars (practical)	Auto-generated from post title, editable in editor
Shopify	lowercase, hyphens	255 chars	Used for products, collections, and pages
Django	lowercase, hyphens	50 chars (default SlugField)	Configurable max_length
Next.js / Astro	lowercase, hyphens	No limit	File-based routing uses the filename as the slug
GitHub repos	lowercase, hyphens	100 chars	Periods also allowed
Medium	lowercase, hyphens + hash	N/A	Appends a random hash to the title slug

SEO Best Practices for URL Slugs

Practice	Reason
Include 1-2 target keywords	URLs are a minor ranking factor - keywords in the slug help both users and search engines understand the page topic
Keep slugs under 60 characters	Long URLs get truncated in search results and are harder to share on social media
Avoid changing slugs after publishing	Changing a slug breaks existing links and social shares unless you set up a 301 redirect
Use flat URL structures when possible	/shoes/running is fine, but /category/subcategory/product/shoes/running is unnecessarily deep
Remove dates from evergreen content	/seo-guide is better than /2026/03/seo-guide for content you plan to keep updated

How Long Should a URL Slug Be?

Aim for 3-5 words and under 60 characters. According to analysis cited by Stan Ventures and Shopify, the average URL length for a top-10 Google result sits around 66 characters, and Google Search Advocate John Mueller has confirmed that URL length is not itself a ranking factor - but longer URLs get truncated in SERPs and are harder to share.

Worked example. Title: "The Ultimate Complete Guide to Buying Running Shoes in 2026". A literal slug would be the-ultimate-complete-guide-to-buying-running-shoes-in-2026 (59 chars). Strip fillers and the year and you get running-shoe-buying-guide (25 chars) - same intent, half the length, cleaner on a mobile SERP snippet. Google's URL Structure guide also recommends avoiding dates in evergreen slugs because the URL becomes misleading once the content is updated.

Why Accented Characters Break URLs

Accented characters work in URLs only via percent-encoding, which produces long, unreadable strings. The letter "e" with an acute accent becomes %C3%A9, so the word "café" becomes caf%C3%A9 - nine characters for a four-letter word. Social platforms often double-encode shared links, which can break them entirely. This generator normalises Unicode via the standard NFD decomposition and an explicit map for characters outside Latin-1 Supplement, so "Düsseldorf" becomes dusseldorf, "São Paulo" becomes sao-paulo, and "Zürich" becomes zurich.

If you need the opposite operation - encoding a URL that already contains special characters - use the URL encoder and decoder, which handles percent-encoding explicitly rather than transliterating.

Stop Words and Slug Compression

Removing stop words ("a", "the", "of", "to", "in", "for") shortens slugs without hurting meaning. The same Matt Cutts Google video that covered hyphens also noted that stop words in URLs carry little weight - search engines essentially ignore them as relevance signals. A 2024 Backlinko study of 11.8 million Google search results found a weak but consistent correlation between shorter URLs and higher average positions, most likely mediated by click-through rate on mobile.

Full Title	Default Slug	Compressed Slug	Chars Saved
How to Make the Best Sourdough Bread at Home	how-to-make-the-best-sourdough-bread-at-home	best-sourdough-bread-recipe	17
A Beginners Guide to Investing in the Stock Market	a-beginners-guide-to-investing-in-the-stock-market	stock-market-beginners-guide	22
The 10 Best Laptops for Students in 2026	the-10-best-laptops-for-students-in-2026	best-student-laptops	20

When to Redirect an Old Slug

Never change a published slug without setting up a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one. Google treats the old and new URLs as separate pages otherwise - you lose accumulated backlinks and inbound traffic, and any reference from outside (email newsletters, printed material, social shares) returns a 404.

Scenario	Action
Typo in live slug	Fix the slug and add a 301 redirect. Typos still get shared.
Content topic drifted	Better to leave the URL and add a canonical tag or publish a new page with fresh slug and an internal link from the old one.
Removing a year from a slug	301 redirect from the dated URL. Don't delete.
Translating a site	Use hreflang and separate language-coded slugs (/en/, /fr/), never auto-translate an existing English slug.
Shorter slug for an existing page	Only change if the old slug performs poorly - otherwise the backlinks you keep matter more than the extra 10 characters.

Slugs in Multilingual Sites

Translating a slug is almost always worth the effort. A French reader searching "chaussures de course" is far more likely to click a result with a French slug than an English one. Google's international SEO documentation recommends keeping URL structure consistent across languages but translating the path itself - for example /en/running-shoes and /fr/chaussures-de-course, linked together with hreflang tags so search engines serve the right version per locale. CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) are the main exception: those characters survive in URLs only through punycode or percent-encoding, so many sites either romanise the slug (pinyin for Chinese, romaji for Japanese) or stick to an English slug and rely on the page title and meta description for language targeting.

Common Slug Mistakes

• Stuffing keywords. /cheap-cheap-running-shoes-buy-online was a black-hat tactic that now triggers spam filters.
• Query-string slugs. /page?id=473 still works but tells search engines nothing. Use a readable path.
• Trailing slashes that disagree with your routing. /blog/post and /blog/post/ can be treated as duplicate URLs unless your server canonicalises one version.
• Uppercase. Mixed-case URLs work on most servers but cause case-sensitivity bugs on Linux-hosted sites and duplicate-content issues when shared with different casings.
• Emojis in slugs. They technically work through punycode but render as long encoded strings and break on older software. Avoid.

For slugs that come from user-generated titles, pair this tool with the case converter to normalise input casing before slugifying, or the find and replace tool to strip specific brand names or stop words. Everything runs locally in your browser with no data sent to a server.

Sources

• Google Search Central - URL Structure Best Practices
• Stan Ventures - John Mueller on SEO-friendly URL length
• Shopify - SEO URL Structure Best Practices
• MDN - Percent-encoding
• W3C - Character Model for the World Wide Web: Normalization (NFD/NFC)
• Django documentation - SlugField reference