How to use the Slug Generator
- Type or paste a page title, product name or heading into Title or text.
- Choose a separator (hyphens are best for SEO), and whether to transliterate German umlauts as
ae/oe/ue. - Optionally remove stop words or set a maximum length — the slug is cut at a word boundary, never mid-word.
- Copy the slug, or switch to Bulk to convert a whole list of titles at once and export it as CSV.
What is a URL slug?
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page, such as best-running-shoes in example.com/blog/best-running-shoes. Good slugs are short, lowercase, use hyphens between words and contain only the characters a–z, 0–9 and -, so they never need percent-encoding. This generator turns any title into such a slug, handling the awkward cases — accents, umlauts, ligatures, ampersands, apostrophes and non-Latin scripts — correctly.
How the conversion works
- Transliteration. Accented letters are mapped to their base letters (
é → e,ñ → n,ç → c,ł → l), ligatures are expanded (æ → ae,œ → oe,ß → ss) and Cyrillic and Greek are romanised (Москва → moskva). - German umlauts. With the German option on,
ä/ö/übecomeae/oe/ue— the spelling German readers expect (Größe → groesse, notgrosse). Turn it off for other languages, e.g. Finnish or Turkish, whereö → ois preferred. - Clean-up. Apostrophes are dropped (
what's → whats),&becomes “and” (or “und”/“et”), every other run of punctuation or whitespace becomes a single separator, and separators at the start and end are trimmed. - Optional trimming. Stop words are removed and the slug is shortened to the maximum length at the last full word.
Examples
| Title | Slug |
|---|---|
| 10 Tips for Better Coffee & Tea! | 10-tips-for-better-coffee-and-tea |
| Crème Brûlée: A Classic Recipe | creme-brulee-a-classic-recipe |
| Über uns – Größe & Qualität | ueber-uns-groesse-und-qualitaet (umlaut option on, “&” → “und”) |
| What's New in Version 2.0? | whats-new-in-version-2-0 |
Slug best practices for SEO
- Use hyphens, not underscores. Google's URL guidelines recommend hyphens to separate words; underscores can cause words to be read as one.
- Keep it short and descriptive. Three to five meaningful words is usually enough. Removing stop words helps, but keep them when they change the meaning (“to-be-or-not-to-be”).
- Stay lowercase. Paths are case-sensitive on most servers, so
/Aboutand/aboutcan become duplicate URLs. - Avoid dates and version numbers in evergreen content so the URL doesn't look outdated — and don't change a published slug without a 301 redirect (see the Redirect Generator).
For other naming styles such as camelCase or snake_case, use the Case Converter.
Tools that pair well with the Slug Generator
- Word Counter — Paste or type your text to count words and characters live — plus reading and speaking time, keyword density and length checks for SEO titles, meta descriptions and social posts.
- UTM Builder — Add utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and friends to any link, see which GA4 channel the visit will land in, and tag a whole list of URLs at once.
- Soft Hyphen Generator — Stop long words like “Versicherungsleistungen” from overflowing on mobile: insert invisible soft hyphens automatically or at your own break points, then copy the result.
- Smart Quotes to Straight Quotes — Code copied from Slack, Notion, Word or a blog won’t run?
Frequently asked questions
Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?
Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, so
blue-shoes is read as “blue shoes”, and hyphens are the convention in almost every CMS. Underscores are fine for file names and code identifiers.How do German umlauts appear in a URL slug?
The standard German transliteration is ä → ae, ö → oe, ü → ue and ß → ss, so “Größe” becomes
groesse. With the umlaut option off, the dots are simply removed (grosse).How long should a URL slug be?
There is no hard limit, but short slugs are easier to read, share and remember. Aim for 3–5 meaningful words, roughly under 60 characters; set “Max length” to enforce a limit without cutting words in half.
Can a slug contain non-English characters?
Yes — URLs can contain Unicode, but browsers and many tools display it percent-encoded (e.g.
%E6%97%A5). Transliterated ASCII slugs are the safest choice; enable “Keep non-Latin letters” if your audience reads a non-Latin script.Should I remove stop words from slugs?
Often, yes:
how-to-make-a-cake → make-cake is shorter. But keep them when they carry meaning or make the slug read naturally — it is a style choice, not a ranking factor.