Input
Output Formats
Accent / Special Character Map
URL Slug Generator converts any text — titles, headings, product names — into clean, URL-friendly slugs. It converts to lowercase, replaces spaces and special characters with hyphens, removes accented characters (or preserves them as Unicode slugs), strips unsafe URL characters, and handles multiple consecutive hyphens. Options include preserving underscores, keeping numbers, and selecting separator character (hyphen or underscore).
A URL slug is the human-readable portion of a URL path: in https://example.com/blog/how-to-build-a-rest-api, the slug is how-to-build-a-rest-api. Good slugs are short, descriptive, and contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. They are created from the content title by normalizing the text, and they directly affect SEO — search engines use the slug to understand the page topic.
SEO best practices for slugs: use hyphens (not underscores) as word separators (Google treats hyphens as word separators; underscores are treated as word joiners), keep slugs short (3-5 meaningful words), include the primary keyword, avoid stop words (a, the, of, for) for brevity, never change a published URL's slug without a 301 redirect (Google treats changed URLs as new pages).
Blog post title to slug
Result: "How to Build a REST API with Node.js" → how-to-build-a-rest-api-with-nodejs
Product name with special characters
Result: "Müller's Kitchen Pro & More!" → mullers-kitchen-pro-more
SEO-optimized short slug
Result: "10 Best Practices for React Performance Optimization" + stop words removed → 10-best-practices-react-performance-optimization
Should I use hyphens or underscores in slugs?
Use hyphens. Google's John Mueller confirmed that Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners — 'my_post' is seen as one word 'mypost', while 'my-post' is seen as two words 'my' and 'post'. Hyphens are also more readable in URLs. RFC 3986 allows both, but hyphen is the established convention for SEO.
Should URL slugs include numbers?
Numbers in slugs are fine for rankings ('top-10-tools') and year-based content ('web-trends-2026'). Avoid numbers that might change — a '2025' in a slug becomes outdated. For product slugs, avoid SKU numbers that change — use the product name instead.
Can I change a slug after publishing?
You can, but you should set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Without a redirect, anyone with the old URL gets a 404, and Google needs to re-crawl and reindex the new URL — you temporarily lose the page's search ranking and all inbound links still point to the dead URL. Keep slugs stable after publishing.
Should slugs include stop words?
It depends on readability vs. brevity. 'how-to-optimize-your-database' is more readable than 'optimize-database' but longer. For most content, remove obvious stop words (the, a, an) at the start of slugs but keep meaningful ones in the middle. SEO impact of stop words is minimal — prioritize readability.
What characters are not allowed in URLs?
Reserved characters (: / ? # [ ] @ ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; =) and unsafe characters (space, " < > { } | \ ^ `) must be percent-encoded in URLs. Slug generators strip or replace these so the slug contains only unreserved characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, hyphen, period, underscore, tilde.