URL Slug Generator

How a title becomes a slug

A slug is the readable last part of a URL, such as ultimate-guide-online-marketing in /blog/ultimate-guide-online-marketing. This generator applies its steps in a fixed order:

1. Stop words (optional). With the checkbox ticked, the text is split on spaces and any word matching one of 16 stop words is dropped, ignoring case and any punctuation stuck to its edges: a, an, and, the, or, but, of, to, in, on, at, for, with, is, are, was. If that would leave nothing, the full title is used instead.
2. Accents. Accented Latin letters lose their marks ("é" becomes "e", "ü" becomes "u"), and a few letters are spelled out: "ß" becomes "ss", "æ" becomes "ae", "ø" becomes "o".
3. Lowercase everything.
4. Strip punctuation and symbols. Letters and digits from any script are kept, and spaces, hyphens, underscores and dashes all count as word breaks.
5. Join the remaining words with single hyphens, so there are never hyphens at the start or end, or two in a row.

Worked examples

Edge cases that surprise people

• Only listed words are stop words. "(And Why It Matters)" becomes why-it-matters, because "(And" counts as "and" once its bracket is ignored. "Is It Worth It?" becomes it-worth-it, because "Is" is removed but "It" is not on the list.
• Apostrophes join, underscores split. "Don't" becomes dont, while "snake_case" becomes snake-case. Google's URL guidance recommends hyphens to separate words, which is what the underscore turns into.
• Other scripts are kept. "Привет мир" becomes привет-мир, and Japanese, Arabic or Greek titles work the same way. Browsers show such slugs as typed, but they are percent-encoded when copied or shared, so a Cyrillic word turns into a long run of %D0%BF-style codes. For an ASCII-only URL, transliterate the title first.
• Stray dashes are cleaned up. "- Intro" gives intro, with no leading hyphen.
• No length limit. The slug is never truncated, so shorten long titles yourself. Three to six meaningful words is a common target.

Slug choices that matter later

Keep the slug stable once the page is live, because changing it breaks inbound links and splits ranking signals unless you add a 301 redirect; the redirect generator writes those rules. Leave dates out of slugs for evergreen pages, since a year in the URL ages badly. If you want underscores as the separator, or no stop-word logic at all, the text to slug converter offers a separator choice. Related reading: meta description best practices covers the other on-page text that appears next to the URL in results.