I have shipped enough WordPress sites and Laravel apps to have made every slug mistake there is. The one that still makes me wince: a client's blog migration where a batch of imported titles carried curly apostrophes and accented characters straight into the permalinks. The URLs technically worked, but they were littered with %E2%80%99 and %C3%A9 — the percent-encoded ghosts of characters that should never have made it into a slug. Shared links looked broken, a few analytics tools truncated them, and cleaning it up afterward meant redirects for hundreds of pages.
A slug is a small thing that quietly determines how a page looks in search results, how it gets shared, and whether your routing matches. Getting it right at creation time costs nothing; getting it wrong costs redirects and lost link equity. I build toolz.dev and the WP Adminify plugin, so I write and generate slugs constantly, and I built the Slug Generator to do the boring, exacting work correctly every time — transliterate accents, strip punctuation, pick a separator, and hand back something you can drop straight into a URL.
TL;DR: A URL slug should be lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII-only, and short. The hard parts are transliterating accented characters (café → cafe), stripping punctuation without leaving double hyphens, and deciding whether to drop stop words. The Slug Generator does all of it in-browser, handles one title or a whole pasted list at once, and lets you cap the length at a word boundary.
What exactly is a URL slug?
A slug is the human-readable identifier at the end of a URL that names a specific page. In https://toolz.dev/tools/slug-generator, the slug is slug-generator. In https://example.com/blog/how-to-cache-in-laravel, the slug is how-to-cache-in-laravel. It is usually derived from the page title, and it becomes the canonical, permanent handle for that resource — which is exactly why you want it clean from the start.
A well-formed slug follows a few conventions that have hardened into near-universal practice. It is lowercase, because URLs are case-sensitive on many servers and mixed case invites duplicate-content confusion between /About and /about. It uses hyphens between words. It contains only unreserved URL characters — letters, digits, and hyphens — so it never needs percent-encoding. And it is concise, because a slug is not a place to dump the entire title. understanding-css-grid is a slug; understanding-the-css-grid-layout-module-a-complete-beginners-guide-for-2026 is a title someone forgot to trim.
The reason slugs matter beyond aesthetics is that they are load-bearing. Search engines read the words in a slug as a ranking and relevance signal. People decide whether to click based partly on how trustworthy the URL looks. And your own application routing often matches on the slug, so an unexpected character can mean a 404. A slug is small, but a lot rides on it.
How does slugifying actually work, step by step?
Turning arbitrary text into a slug is a pipeline, and each stage handles a class of problem. Understanding the stages helps you predict what the tool will produce.
First comes special-character mapping. Some characters should not just be deleted — they carry meaning. An ampersand should usually become the word "and," ß should become "ss," and ligatures like æ should expand to "ae." Silently dropping them produces slugs that read wrong. The Slug Generator maps these before anything else, so "Fish & Chips" becomes fish-and-chips, not fish-chips.
Second is transliteration of accents, technically Unicode NFKD normalization followed by stripping the combining marks. This decomposes an accented letter into a base letter plus a separate accent mark, then removes the mark. "café" becomes "cafe," "naïve" becomes "naive," "Schön" becomes "Schon." This is the single most important step for international content, because it is what prevents the percent-encoded mess I described at the top.
Third, the text is lowercased (optionally), then tokenized: every run of non-alphanumeric characters — spaces, punctuation, symbols — is treated as a word boundary. This collapses "Hello, World!!!" into the words "hello" and "world" without leaving empty fragments or trailing separators. Finally, the words are joined with your chosen separator, and if you set a maximum length, the slug is truncated at a word boundary so you never cut a word in half. The result is deterministic: the same input and options always produce the same slug, which is exactly the property you want for URLs.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Use hyphens. This is not a matter of taste — Google has stated for years that it treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners. That means seo-friendly-urls is read as three words, "seo," "friendly," "urls," while seo_friendly_urls can be interpreted as the single token "seo_friendly_urls." For anything public-facing where search visibility matters, hyphens are the correct choice.
Underscores still have legitimate uses, which is why the Slug Generator offers both. Some legacy systems, internal tools, and file-naming conventions expect underscores. Programming identifiers use them. If you are generating slugs that feed into a system with an underscore convention rather than public URLs, switch the separator. But if you are generating a blog permalink or a marketing page path, leave it on hyphen and do not overthink it.
One thing to avoid entirely: spaces and camelCase in URLs. A space becomes %20 or a +, both ugly. CamelCase reintroduces the case-sensitivity problem and defeats the word-separation signal. The whole point of slugifying is to get to a form that is unambiguous for servers, search engines, and humans at the same time, and lowercase-with-hyphens is the form that satisfies all three.
When should I strip stop words from a slug?
Stop words are the small, high-frequency words — "the," "a," "and," "of," "to," "in" — that carry little independent search value. Removing them shortens a slug and concentrates the keywords: "The Best Way to Learn React" becomes best-way-learn-react instead of the-best-way-to-learn-react. Some SEO practitioners prefer this because it keeps slugs tight and keyword-dense.
It is genuinely optional, and I would not treat it as a hard rule. Removing stop words can occasionally make a slug read awkwardly or change its meaning — "state of the art" reduced to state-art loses something. My rule of thumb: strip stop words when the title is long and the removal reads naturally, keep them when the slug is already short or when they are structurally important to the phrase. The Slug Generator makes it a toggle so you can see both versions instantly, and it is careful never to strip so aggressively that the slug becomes empty — if every word in a title is a stop word, it keeps them.
Length is the related lever. A common guideline is to keep slugs to roughly three to six words, or under about 60 characters, so they display fully in search results and stay easy to share. The tool's max-length option truncates at a word boundary, so a long title gets cut cleanly rather than mid-word.
Slug conventions compared
Different platforms and contexts expect slightly different slug forms. Here is how the common conventions line up, and which the Slug Generator targets by default.
| Context | Separator | Case | Accents | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO / blog URLs | hyphen | lowercase | transliterated | how-to-cache-in-laravel |
| WordPress permalink | hyphen | lowercase | transliterated | best-wordpress-plugins |
| Next.js / React route | hyphen | lowercase | transliterated | user-account-settings |
| Filename / asset | hyphen or underscore | lowercase | transliterated | annual-report-2026 |
| Code identifier | underscore | lower or camel | stripped | user_account_id |
The default configuration — hyphen, lowercase, transliterated accents — covers the first four rows, which is the vast majority of real slug work. Only the last row, code identifiers, wants a different convention, and even then it is a separator switch away.
Common use cases where a slug generator earns its keep
Blog and CMS migrations
The scenario that started this article. When you import hundreds of posts from an old system, their titles arrive with whatever characters the authors typed — smart quotes, em dashes, accents, emoji. Batch mode in the Slug Generator lets you paste an entire column of titles, one per line, and get back a matching column of clean slugs you can drop into your import file. Doing this once, correctly, is far cheaper than generating messy slugs and then untangling redirects.
New routes in an app
When I scaffold pages in a React or Laravel project, I want route segments that match the page names but are URL-safe. Paste the list of page titles, generate the slugs, and paste them into the router. Because the output is deterministic, the slug I generate at design time is exactly what the framework will expect at runtime, which avoids the subtle bugs where a route almost matches.
International and multilingual content
Content with accented characters — French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Scandinavian — is where naive slugifying falls apart. The transliteration step turns "Málaga" into malaga and "Zürich" into zurich, giving you readable ASCII slugs instead of percent-encoded noise. This keeps URLs shareable and analytics-friendly across languages.
Product and category pages
E-commerce lives on slugs: every product and category needs a stable, readable URL. A product named "Men's Running Shoes — Blue/Grey (2026)" runs through the generator to men-s-running-shoes-blue-grey-2026 — the em dash, slash, and parentheses vanish, and the apostrophe, like every other non-alphanumeric character, is treated as a word boundary rather than silently deleted. That behavior is worth knowing: if you would rather see mens than men-s, drop the apostrophe in the title before you generate. Either way, the messy real-world punctuation gets normalized into something URL-safe.
Why generate slugs in the browser?
The Slug Generator runs entirely client-side. Your titles — which might be unpublished posts, internal product names, or a client's content roadmap — are never uploaded, and the tool works offline once the page loads. For unreleased content, that privacy is not a nice-to-have; it is the difference between using a tool and not being able to. The data privacy in online tools guide digs into why in-browser processing is worth insisting on.
Slugs also sit next to a handful of other everyday web tasks. The URL Encoder/Decoder handles the query-string and full-URL encoding that slugs deliberately avoid. The Case Converter is useful when you are wrangling text into other formats. And the Word Counter helps keep titles and metadata within length limits. For the wider set of utilities I keep open while building, the web developer toolkit roundup is the place to start.
FAQ
What is a URL slug?
A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page, usually derived from the page title. In https://toolz.dev/tools/slug-generator, the slug is "slug-generator". A clean slug is lowercase, uses hyphens between words, and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in a slug?
Use hyphens. Google explicitly treats hyphens as word separators but reads underscores as joiners, so "seo_friendly_url" can be interpreted as a single word while "seo-friendly-url" is read as three. Hyphens are the SEO standard for URLs; underscores are better left to code identifiers and filenames.
How does the slug generator handle accented characters?
It transliterates them to their closest ASCII equivalent using Unicode normalization plus a character map. So "résumé" becomes "resume", "naïve" becomes "naive", and "Straße" becomes "strasse". This keeps URLs clean and avoids the unreadable percent-encoding that raw non-ASCII characters produce in links.
What are stop words and should I remove them from slugs?
Stop words are common filler words such as "the", "a", "and", "of", and "to" that carry little search value. Removing them shortens the slug and concentrates the keywords, which some SEOs prefer. It is optional — for readability you may want to keep them, and the tool never removes so many words that the slug becomes empty.
How long should a URL slug be?
Keep slugs short and descriptive — roughly three to six words, or under about 60 characters, is a common guideline. Shorter slugs are easier to read, share, and remember, and they display fully in search results. Use the length limit option to truncate long titles at a word boundary.
Can I generate slugs for many titles at once?
Yes. Paste multiple titles into the input with one per line and enable batch mode to get a matching slug for every line. This is useful for migrating a blog, generating routes from a list of page names, or preparing a spreadsheet of slugs for import.
Is the slug generator suitable for WordPress permalinks?
Yes. The output matches how WordPress sanitizes post slugs — lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII only — so you can paste the result directly into the permalink field. It is also compatible with Next.js, Laravel, Rails, and any framework that expects URL-safe path segments.
Does my text stay private?
Yes. Slug generation runs entirely in your browser with plain JavaScript. No titles or text are transmitted, logged, or stored, and the tool keeps working with no internet connection once the page has loaded.
