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ToolBoxGenie

Slug Generator

Text Tools · Added 12 August 2026

Turn a headline into the URL that will carry it. Accented letters are reduced to their base form, symbols that carry meaning are spelled out, and everything else becomes a clean separator — with a batch mode that keeps a whole list of titles unique.

Mode

The slug updates as you type.

Google treats a hyphen as a word break and an underscore as a joiner.

Truncation always falls back to the last whole word.

How to use the slug generator

  1. 1Paste or type the title. The slug appears as you type.
  2. 2Pick a separator. Hyphen is almost always the right answer for the web.
  3. 3Set a maximum length if your CMS or your own house style imposes one — truncation falls back to the last whole word.
  4. 4Turn on 'drop filler words' to strip the, of, and and similar from a long headline.
  5. 5Switch to list mode to convert a whole set of titles at once; colliding slugs are numbered automatically.

Examples

A normal headline

Input
10 Things I Learned About Café Culture in Zürich
Result
10-things-i-learned-about-cafe-culture-in-zurich

é and ü are reduced to their base letters rather than dropped.

Symbols that carry meaning

Input
Save 50% on Rock & Roll Classics
Result
save-50-percent-on-rock-and-roll-classics

Deleting the & and the % would change what the title says, so they are spelled out instead.

Trimming a long title

Input
'The Complete Guide to Everything You Ever Wanted' with filler words dropped and a 50-character limit
Result
complete-guide-everything-you-ever-wanted

The cut lands on a word boundary — a slug never ends mid-word.

About the slug generator

What a slug is actually for

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL, and it does two jobs. It tells a person what they are about to open before they click, in a search result or a pasted link. And it gives a search engine a small, honest signal about the page's subject.

Neither job rewards stuffing. Repeating a keyword three times in a slug does nothing for ranking and makes the URL look like spam to the person deciding whether to click it. The version that describes the page in a few plain words is the version that performs, and it is also the one you will be able to read in an analytics report two years from now.

Uniqueness is the failure mode nobody plans for

Two different titles routinely collapse to the same slug — 'The 2026 Guide' and '2026 Guide!' both become 2026-guide. On a single post that never comes up. On an import of two hundred titles it comes up immediately, and what happens next depends entirely on the system: some reject the second row, some silently append a number, and some overwrite the first record.

That is why the list mode here numbers collisions rather than emitting duplicates. It surfaces the clash while you can still rename the title properly, which is a much better outcome than discovering months later that two articles have been fighting over one URL.

Frequently asked questions

Hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Google has said for years that it treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so 'text_diff_checker' can be read as one long token while 'text-diff-checker' is read as three words. Underscores are offered here because some systems and file naming conventions require them, not because they are a good choice for a public URL.
What happens to non-English characters?
Accented Latin letters are reduced to their base form — é becomes e, ü becomes u — and letters with no base form, such as ß and ø, are transliterated to ss and o. Entirely non-Latin scripts such as Cyrillic or Greek are left as they are, because those are valid in a modern URL and stripping them would leave nothing behind.
How long should a slug be?
Long enough to describe the page and no longer. There is no ranking penalty for length, but a slug is read by people in search results, in shared links and in analytics reports, and a sixty-character one is comfortable to read while a two-hundred-character one is not. Dropping filler words is usually enough to get there.
Should I change the slug of a page that is already published?
Only with a redirect in place. The URL is the identity of the page as far as search engines and everyone who has linked to it are concerned. Changing it without a 301 from the old address discards the accumulated signals and breaks every existing link — a tidier slug is rarely worth that.

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