URL Slug Generator

What makes a good slug

The slug is the part of the URL that identifies the page — /blog/url-slugs, not the domain around it. It is a small ranking signal and a large human one. People see it in the address bar, in shared links, in search results, and in every place someone pastes the bare URL as a link. A good slug is short (3 to 5 words), lowercase, hyphen-separated, contains the head keyword the page targets, and contains nothing else: no dates, no filler, no tracking fragments, no session IDs.

Stop words are a judgment call, which is why removal is a toggle here rather than a default. Dropping “the,” “a,” and “to” buys brevity, but keep them when removal bends the meaning — to-be-or-not-to-be should stay intact. The tool skips removal entirely if it would leave the slug empty.

How the cleaning pipeline works

The order of operations matters, so here is exactly what happens to your title, in sequence. First the text is trimmed and Unicode-normalized (NFKD), which decomposes accented letters into a base letter plus a combining mark — é becomes e plus an accent. The combining marks are then stripped, so résumé ends as resume, ü as u, ñ as n. An ampersand becomes the word and. Apostrophes are deleted rather than replaced, so don’t becomes dont, not don-t. Everything that is not a letter or number then becomes the separator, runs of separators collapse to one, and leading or trailing separators are trimmed. If stop-word removal is on, a 22-word English list is filtered out. Finally the slug is cut to the maximum length — 60 characters by default — at a word boundary, never mid-word.

How to use it well

Paste the headline, then stop treating the slug as the headline’s shadow. The two have different jobs: the headline earns the click with craft, the slug names the page with the words people search. “The Inbox Zero Lie” is a fine headline and a weak slug — inbox-zero-method serves the URL better, because searchers type the topic, not your angle. The three alternates below the main output exist for exactly this comparison: the full slug, the stop-word-free version, and a five-word cut. Read them aloud and take the shortest one that still makes a complete promise.

Decide your URL pattern once and keep it flat. /blog/choose-crm beats /blog/2024/03/sales/tools/choose-crm — every extra directory is a commitment you will want out of later, and depth adds nothing for ranking. The slug is the last URL decision you should need to make per article; the pattern around it should already be settled.

Arabic and Unicode slugs — keep the script or not

With Keep Unicode off, only ASCII letters and numbers survive, so an Arabic title would vanish entirely. Turn it on and any Unicode letter or number is kept — Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, CJK — while punctuation still becomes separators.

Keep the script when the site and its searchers are in that language. Google indexes and displays non-Latin URLs natively, Arabic Wikipedia and major Arabic publishers use Arabic paths, and a slug that matches the headline is more readable than any transliteration. The cost is encoding: outside the browser, the slug percent-encodes, and each Arabic letter expands to 6 characters (%D8%A7), so a 20-letter slug becomes roughly 120 characters of escapes in plain-text email or logs. Prefer a Latin slug when your audience is mixed-language or your links travel through systems that mangle encoded URLs. Note what this tool does not do: it strips unmappable characters rather than transliterating, because romanization of Arabic is genuinely inconsistent — if you want a Latin slug for Arabic content, write the translation yourself and slugify that.

Changing a slug after publishing means a redirect

The URL is the page’s identity. Every backlink, bookmark, and index entry points at the exact address, so renaming a published slug without a redirect turns all of them into 404s and forfeits the authority those links carry. If you must rename: set a permanent 301 redirect from old to new, update internal links so they point directly at the new URL instead of riding the redirect, update the sitemap and canonical tag, and leave the redirect in place long-term — Google’s guidance is to keep it for at least a year so signals fully consolidate. Even done correctly, expect a re-indexing wobble measured in days to weeks. The cheaper path is to get the slug right before publishing, which is what this tool is for. Pair it with the SERP preview to see how the URL line reads in a result.

Honest limitations

• Diacritic stripping only works for letters built from a base plus accent. Letters that do not decompose — ø, ß, æ, đ, ł — are dropped, not transliterated to o, ss, or ae. Check the output for German, Danish, or Polish titles.
• The stop-word list is English-only; other languages pass through untouched.
• A single word longer than the maximum length is hard-cut, since there is no word boundary to respect.
• The tool cannot know your site: it does not check for collisions with existing URLs, reserved paths in your CMS, or slugs already taken by another article. That last check is on you.