URL Slug Generator: Free SEO-Friendly Slugs

This URL slug generator turns page titles into clean, lowercase slugs you can paste straight into your CMS. Type one title per line, choose a separator, set an optional maximum length, and the tool returns one slug per line, ready to copy. It suits bloggers, SEOs, developers and anyone publishing many pages.

What Is a URL Slug?

A URL slug is the last part of a web address that names one specific page, written in plain words. In example.com/blog/url-slug-guide, the slug is url-slug-guide. The term comes from publishing, where a slug is a short label for a story.

People often ask about slug versus path. The path is everything after the domain (/blog/url-slug-guide), while the slug is only the final segment that identifies the page. Most content systems, including WordPress and Squarespace, expose it as an editable "URL slug" or "permalink" field.

What makes a slug SEO-friendly?

A good slug is short, readable and describes the page at a glance. Google's URL structure guidance recommends separating words with hyphens rather than underscores, and keeping URLs simple and descriptive. Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens are the safest choice, because they avoid encoded characters and case-sensitivity problems.

How to Use the URL Slug Generator

You can create slugs in a few seconds, and the output updates as you type, so there is no generate button to press.

1. Paste or type your titles into the box labeled "Title(s), one per line". Each line becomes its own slug.
2. Pick a "Separator": Hyphen ( - ) or Underscore ( _ ). Hyphen is the default and the usual choice for web pages.
3. Set "Max length" if you need a character cap. The value 0 means no limit.
4. Leave "Lowercase" checked for lowercase output, or untick it to keep your original capitalization.
5. Tick "Strip stop words" if you want small filler words such as "the", "of" and "in" removed.
6. Read the results in the "Slugs" box and press "Copy". Press "Clear" to empty the input and start again.

Blank lines stay blank in the output, so your slugs always line up with your titles. That makes it easy to paste a whole column from a spreadsheet and paste the results back beside it.

Worked Example: Two Titles, Two Settings

Here is what the tool returns for two sample titles with default settings, and again with "Strip stop words" ticked.

The first slug drops from 38 characters to 30 and keeps every meaningful word, so stripping stop words works well there. The second slug loses "how-to", which signals a tutorial. In that case, keep the default output or trim it by hand to something like build-website-html-css only if the shorter form still matches what people search.

The ampersand becomes the word "and" in the default output. Accents are simplified too: "Crème Brûlée Recipe: Café Style" becomes creme-brulee-recipe-cafe-style, and "Straße & Café" becomes strasse-and-cafe.

How Do You Read and Act on the Results?

A good slug reads like a short phrase a person could say aloud, and it contains the main keyword of the page. Check each output line against a few quick rules.

• Length: three to five words, and under roughly 60 characters, is a widely used guideline. If a slug is longer, tick "Strip stop words" first, then trim by hand.
• Max length cuts: the cap counts characters, including separators, and cuts at that exact position. With the 38-character slug above, a limit of 30 gives 10-seo-tips-that-actually-work, which ends cleanly. A limit of 28 gives 10-seo-tips-that-actually-wo, which cuts a word in half. Raise or lower the number until the ending is a whole word.
• Extra single letters: an apostrophe is treated as a space, so "Don't Stop" becomes don-t-stop and "Mom's Pie" becomes mom-s-pie. Remove apostrophes from the title before generating, or edit the slug.
• Empty output: a title written fully in a non-Latin script returns nothing, because only Latin letters and digits are kept. Type a Latin-script keyword version for the slug instead.

Who Is a Slug Generator For?

It is useful anywhere you need consistent, predictable page addresses without fixing each one manually.

• Bloggers and editors: turn a headline into a permalink before you publish.
• Site migrations and content audits: paste dozens of titles at once and copy the whole list of slugs into your URL map.
• E-commerce teams: convert product names with accents, ampersands and symbols into clean URL segments.
• Developers: choose the underscore option when a system, file name or identifier requires it. In underscore mode, hyphens already in your text are converted to underscores so the output stays consistent.

Best Practices and Common Mistakes

The best slugs are short, stable and written for people first. A few habits prevent most problems.

Use the keyword, not the whole headline

A title such as "The Complete Beginner's Guide to Choosing Running Shoes in 2025" works as a headline, but a slug like choosing-running-shoes is easier to read, share and remember. Generate the full slug, then delete the extra words.

Leave out dates and years on evergreen pages

A year in the slug makes a page look stale as soon as the year changes, and updating the slug means a redirect. Keep it only when the date is part of the topic.

Do not change a live slug casually

If a page is already indexed, a new slug creates a new address. Redirect the old URL to the new one with a permanent redirect, and confirm the preferred address with a canonical tag checker.

Stay consistent with case and separators

Many servers treat /Page and /page as different addresses, which can create duplicates. Keeping "Lowercase" checked and sticking to one separator across the whole site avoids that.

Check how it looks in search

Google can show the URL in results, so a clear slug supports the click. Preview the title, description and address together in a SERP snippet preview before publishing. If your pages sit in folders, a breadcrumb schema generator can describe that hierarchy, while this tool handles only the final segment.

Do not strip stop words blindly

The fixed list includes words such as "how", "what", "why", "to" and "in". Removing them can change a phrase like "what is seo" into just "seo". Review any slug where meaning matters.

Limitations to Know About

• Only Latin letters, numbers and your chosen separator remain. Accented Latin letters are simplified, but characters from other scripts, such as Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese, are dropped, not converted.
• Special characters and punctuation are replaced with word breaks, never preserved.
• The stop word list is fixed and English only.
• The tool does not check whether a slug is already used on your site, and it does not add folders or a domain. Multilingual sites that publish the same page in several languages should also set up hreflang tags so each version points to the right audience.

Ready to clean up your page addresses? Paste your titles into the generator above, adjust the options, and copy the slugs. For more tools that tidy up titles, descriptions and page structure, browse the on-page SEO and meta tags tools.