🔗 Slugify
Turn any title into a clean URL slug
About the Slugify Tool
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. Slugs like "best-coffee-brewing-methods" are cleaner, more memorable, and more search-engine friendly than numeric IDs or encoded strings. This Slugify Tool converts any title, phrase, or heading into a properly formatted URL-safe slug in one step.
URL slugs need to follow specific rules to work reliably across all browsers and servers. They should use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. Spaces become hyphens, special characters are stripped or transliterated, and accented letters like "e" with an accent are converted to their plain ASCII equivalents. Failing to do this properly can result in broken links, encoding errors, or pages that behave differently across operating systems.
Good slugs also matter for search engine optimization. Search engines read the words in a URL slug as ranking signals for the page. A slug like "chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe" tells a search engine exactly what the page is about, while a slug like "post-4821" tells it almost nothing. Using descriptive, keyword-relevant slugs is one of the simplest on-page SEO improvements you can make.
The tool handles a wide range of input gracefully. Capitalization is lowercased automatically. Multiple consecutive spaces or hyphens are collapsed into a single hyphen. Leading and trailing hyphens are stripped so the output starts and ends cleanly with a letter or number. Common stop words like "a", "the", and "and" can optionally be removed to keep slugs concise.
Developers building content management systems, blog platforms, or e-commerce sites often need to generate slugs programmatically from user-submitted titles. This tool is useful both as a quick manual converter and as a reference for the exact transformation logic you want to replicate in your own code.
How it works
- Type or paste any title, heading, or phrase into the input field.
- The tool automatically lowercases all letters and replaces spaces with hyphens.
- Special characters and punctuation are stripped from the output.
- Accented or non-ASCII letters are converted to their closest ASCII equivalents.
- Multiple consecutive hyphens are collapsed into a single hyphen.
- Copy the finished slug and paste it directly into your CMS, route, or URL field.
What you'll learn
- Slugs should use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens for maximum compatibility.
- Descriptive slugs improve SEO by giving search engines clear keyword signals.
- Accented characters are transliterated to ASCII so slugs work across all systems.
- Consecutive hyphens and leading or trailing hyphens are cleaned automatically.
- Short, descriptive slugs are generally better than long exhaustive ones.
- Slug conventions are used in WordPress, Shopify, Hugo, Jekyll, and most major CMS platforms.
FAQs
- Why do slugs use hyphens instead of underscores?
- Google has historically treated hyphens as word separators but underscores as word joiners. Using hyphens means "best-coffee" is read as two separate keywords, while "best_coffee" may be read as one compound term.
- What happens to characters like "&", "@", or "#" in slugs?
- Most special characters are simply stripped from the output. Ampersands are sometimes replaced with "and" for readability. The result is always a clean string containing only URL-safe characters.
- Should I include stop words like "the" and "a" in my slugs?
- For most use cases, removing common stop words keeps slugs shorter and more focused. However, if the stop word is part of a proper name or brand, it is better to keep it in.
- Can I slugify text in languages other than English?
- Yes. The tool converts accented characters like those in French, Spanish, or German to their ASCII equivalents, producing valid slugs from non-English source text.
- Is there a maximum length for a URL slug?
- There is no hard technical limit, but best practice is to keep slugs under about 75 characters. Shorter slugs are easier to share, read, and remember, and search engines give slightly more weight to keywords that appear earlier in the URL.