Free URL Slug Generator

A URL slug is the last part of a web address, the words that name one page. In example.com/blog/best-hiking-trails, the slug is best-hiking-trails. A good slug tells a reader and a search engine what the page is about before they open it, and it stays readable when the link is pasted into an email or a chat.

Google's guidance on URL structure asks for simple, descriptive URLs that use words people understand, and recommends hyphens rather than underscores between words. A slug of real words also gives a pasted link some context, where a string of numbers gives none.

1. It splits the title into words at spaces and punctuation. Symbols such as & and ! never reach the slug, and an apostrophe inside a word is dropped, so don't becomes dont.
2. With stop-word removal on, it leaves out the short function words of the language you pick, such as the, of and to in English or für, die and und in German.
3. It spells accented Latin letters in plain ASCII: ä, ö and ü as ae, oe and ue, ß as ss, æ as ae, ø as o, å as aa and œ as oe, and other accents are removed, so é becomes e and ñ becomes n.
4. It lowercases the words and joins them with single hyphens, with no hyphen at the start or end.
5. It cuts the slug at a hyphen to fit the length target, 60 characters unless you change it.

Letters of other alphabets, such as Cyrillic, Greek or Japanese, are kept and lowercased. Browsers show them as typed and send them percent-encoded, which search engines read correctly. The length target counts characters, not the percent-encoded bytes, which are longer: each Cyrillic letter takes 6 and each Japanese character 9. If your site needs plain ASCII addresses, write the title in Latin letters first.

• Short: a few words that name the topic. Long slugs get cut off in search results and are hard to read aloud.
• Descriptive: the main keyword of the page, in the words people search with.
• Lowercase with hyphens: some servers treat capital letters as a different address, and hyphens read as spaces.
• Stable: a slug that changes breaks old links. If you must change one, redirect the old address to the new one with a 301 redirect.
• No dates or numbers that will age, unless the page is about that year or that number.

There is no published length limit for a slug that helps ranking; the target here is a writing aid. Most guides suggest keeping slugs under about 60 characters so the whole address stays readable, and that is the default target.

Often, but not always. Removing words such as the, a and of makes a slug shorter without changing what it says, so how-to-plan-a-garden can become plan-garden. But some short words carry the meaning: a slug that drops not from why you should not run every day says the opposite of its title. The generator always keeps negations such as not, without, ohne, sans, sin and zonder, even with stop-word removal on.

The stop word lists are the Snowball project's published lists for each language, and the tool links to each one with the date it was checked. Pick the language the title is written in: German stop words will not remove English words, and the other way round.

The slug is cut at the last hyphen that fits, so no word is broken in half. When the cut removes words that carry meaning, the generator says which ones, so you can raise the target, shorten the title or remove stop words instead. A single word longer than the target is kept whole rather than cut, and the result says the slug is still over the target. That is common in Japanese, Chinese and Thai, which are written without spaces between words: the slug splits only at punctuation there, so the target cannot shorten it, and the way to a shorter slug is a shorter title.

For many pages at once, paste one title per line. Each line gets its own slug and its own warning, and Copy all copies every slug, one per line, ready for a spreadsheet or a CMS import. To change the case of titles rather than make slugs, use the case converter, and to check a title's length, the character counter.