Slug Generator

How the slug generator works

Type or paste a title and the slug updates as you type. The conversion runs in this order:

1. Transliterate accents. Characters such as é, ñ, ü and ç are decomposed with Unicode normalisation and the accent marks are stripped, so “Café” becomes “cafe” and “São Paulo” becomes “sao-paulo”. Ligatures and special letters (ß, æ, ø, ł) are mapped to plain ASCII too.
2. Replace & with “and”, so “Tea & Coffee” reads naturally as tea-and-coffee.
3. Lowercase everything (optional but recommended — most servers treat /About and /about as different pages).
4. Replace every run of non-alphanumeric characters (spaces, punctuation, symbols, emoji) with a single separator.
5. Collapse repeated separators and trim any from the ends, so “Hello – World!” gives hello-world, never hello---world-.
6. Apply the max length, cutting at the last separator before the limit so no word is chopped in half.

Example

Choosing a good slug

A slug is part of the URL that both people and search engines read, so treat it like a very short headline.

• Keep it short. Three to six meaningful words is plenty. Drop filler such as “a”, “the” and “of” if the slug still makes sense: emi-calculator-home-loan beats the-best-emi-calculator-for-a-home-loan.
• Put the main keyword first. Search snippets truncate long URLs, and the first few words carry the most weight.
• Avoid dates and numbers you may change. A post at /best-phones-2024/ looks stale the following year; /best-phones/ can be updated forever.
• Never change a published slug without a 301 redirect, or you lose backlinks and rankings.
• Use ASCII only. Browsers can display Hindi or Tamil URLs, but they are percent-encoded when copied (%E0%A4%AD…), which is ugly in messages and breaks on some platforms. Transliterate or translate the title instead.

Where slugs are used

• Blog permalinks in WordPress, Ghost, Hugo and Astro
• Product and category URLs in Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento
• Usernames and handles that must be URL-safe
• File names for images and PDFs — diwali-offer-2026.jpg is better for image search than IMG_4521.jpg
• Anchor IDs for headings inside a page

Tips

• Set a max length of around 60–75 characters for URLs; longer slugs are allowed but get truncated in search results.
• Choose the underscore separator only when a system requires it (some CMS field names, Python module names). For web pages, stay with hyphens.
• The preview under the slug shows it wrapped in slashes so you can picture the final URL.

Frequently asked questions