Free Tool · On-Page SEO

URL Slug Generator

Turn any page title into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug — hyphens, lowercase, stopword removal, accent transliteration and a smart length cap, with bulk mode for whole lists. Free, no signup.

Free · No signup · Runs in your browser · Updated

Question words (how, what, why…) and negations are kept — they carry search intent.

Your slug

1 slug
  • complete-guide-technical-seo-audits-2026-edition
    48 / 60 charsremoved: the, to

Slug rules that hold up: keep it short (3–5 words), put the target keyword first, separate words with hyphens, and never change a slug once the page is published — a changed slug is a brand-new URL, and the old one needs a 301 redirect or it 404s and loses everything it earned.

A URL slug generator turns any page title or headline into a clean, SEO-friendly slug — the part of the URL that identifies the page, like /technical-seo-audit-guide/. Type or paste a title and this slug generator slugifies it instantly: lowercase, hyphen-separated, accents transliterated (é becomes e), emoji and stray punctuation stripped, optional stopword removal that shows you exactly which words it dropped, and a length cap that cuts at a word boundary instead of mid-word. Paste multiple titles, one per line, and it becomes a bulk permalink generator — copy every slug in one click. It runs entirely in your browser: free, no signup, and nothing you type is uploaded anywhere.

Slugs go wrong in quiet, expensive ways. A CMS that defaults to underscores glues words together, because Google's own guidance says hyphens act as word separators and underscores don't — so /seo_audit_guide reads to Google closer to one mashed token than three words. An accented or emoji-laden title becomes a percent-encoded mess like /caf%C3%A9-guide that looks broken everywhere the link is pasted. Mixed-case slugs create duplicate URLs on case-sensitive servers, since /SEO-Guide and /seo-guide are technically different pages. And a title pasted straight into a permalink field produces a 90-character slug that gets truncated in search results, buries the keyword, and reads like spam in every share. Each of these is trivially avoidable at publish time and annoying to fix after.

Getting the slug right before you hit publish is the cheap part of URL hygiene — this tool handles that one page at a time. Keeping hundreds of published URLs healthy is the expensive part: catching redirect chains, case-duplicate URLs, orphaned pages and slugs that drifted from their titles across a whole site is exactly the kind of work Black & Gold SEO automates, auditing your URL structure alongside everything else and shipping the fixes instead of just listing them.

How to use it

  1. 1

    Paste your title — or a whole list

    Type a page title, blog headline or product name into the box. The slug appears instantly below as you type — no submit button. For bulk mode, paste multiple titles one per line: each line becomes its own slug, and the copy button grabs them all, one per line, ready for a spreadsheet or CMS import.

  2. 2

    Pick your separator and case

    Hyphens are the default and the right answer for SEO: Google documents that it treats hyphens as word separators, while underscores join words together. Lowercase stays on by default because mixed-case URLs can resolve as duplicate pages on case-sensitive servers. Only switch these if a legacy system forces your hand.

  3. 3

    Decide whether to strip stopwords

    The stopword toggle removes filler words like a, the, and, of, to — and shows you exactly which words it dropped under each slug so nothing happens silently. Question words (how, what, why) and negations are deliberately kept because they carry search intent. If removal would empty the slug entirely, the tool keeps the original words instead.

  4. 4

    Set the length cap

    The slider defaults to 60 characters — a practical ceiling that keeps slugs readable in search results and share previews. When a title runs long, the tool cuts at a word boundary, never mid-word, and flags the slug in amber so you know it was truncated and can consider tightening the title instead.

  5. 5

    Handle accents, emoji and symbols

    Transliteration converts accented characters to plain ASCII (é → e, ø → o, ß → ss) so your URLs never turn into percent-encoded soup when shared. ASCII-only mode strips emoji and symbols entirely. Ampersands are rewritten as the word 'and', and apostrophes vanish cleanly — 'don't' becomes dont, not don-t.

  6. 6

    Copy and paste into your CMS

    Each slug has its own copy button, and the header button copies everything at once. Paste into the permalink or URL field of WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or your framework's route config. Do this before publishing — once a URL is live and indexed, changing the slug means setting up a 301 redirect.

A good slug is short, keyword-first and honest about the page. Aim for three to five words: /technical-seo-audit-guide/ beats /the-complete-and-definitive-guide-to-technical-seo-audits-in-2026/ in every context the URL appears — the address bar, search result breadcrumbs, share previews and anchor text when someone links to you with the bare URL. Put the most important words first, because that's what survives truncation and what a human scans. Skip dates and years in slugs for evergreen content you plan to update; a /best-crm-2024/ URL undercuts the page the moment you refresh it for 2026, and changing the slug then costs you a redirect. Google has been clear for years that simple, descriptive words in URLs help, that hyphens beat underscores, and that URLs are a minor ranking signal at most — the real payoff is click-through and trust, since a readable URL looks safer than a hash-and-parameter string in every place a person decides whether to click.

The rule that matters most comes after publishing: slugs are permanent. Every changed slug creates a brand-new URL and orphans the old one — along with its backlinks, its social shares, its search rankings and its browser bookmarks. The fix is a 301 redirect, which works but adds a hop, and sites that rename casually end up with redirect chains that waste crawl budget and slow users down. So invest the thirty seconds now: generate the slug, check it reads well, confirm the keyword survived the stopword filter, and only then publish. If you're doing this for dozens of titles — a content calendar, a programmatic batch, a site migration — bulk mode plus the length flags will surface the handful of titles that need a human rewrite before they become URLs you're stuck with.

One honest caveat on stopword stripping: it's a readability trade, not a ranking trick. Google handles stopwords in URLs fine, and /how-to-tie-a-tie/ is a better slug than /tie-tie/ — which is exactly why this tool keeps question words and shows its removals instead of hiding them. Use the toggle to shorten flabby titles, then read the result like a human would. If the slug no longer says what the page is, put the words back.

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Questions

Frequently asked

What is a URL slug generator and is this one free?

A URL slug generator converts a page title or headline into the URL-safe slug that identifies the page — lowercase words separated by hyphens, with punctuation, accents and filler stripped out. This one is completely free with no signup, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded or stored. It also works as a bulk permalink generator — paste titles one per line and copy all the slugs at once.

Should URL slugs use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Google's documentation on URL structure explicitly recommends hyphens because it treats them as word separators, while underscores join words together — /seo-audit-guide is read as three words, /seo_audit_guide closer to one. Underscores only make sense when a legacy system already uses them site-wide, because consistency beats a risky mass rename.

How long should a URL slug be?

Three to five words, and roughly 60 characters or fewer, is the practical sweet spot — short enough to read in full in search results, share cards and the address bar, long enough to say what the page is. There's no hard limit that hurts rankings, but long slugs bury the keyword, get visually truncated everywhere, and read like spam. This SEO friendly URL generator cuts at a word boundary at your chosen cap and flags any slug it had to trim.

Should I remove stop words like 'the' and 'of' from slugs?

It's optional, and it's a readability call rather than a ranking one — Google handles stopwords in URLs fine. Removing them shortens flabby titles nicely, but strip too aggressively and the slug stops making sense. That's why this tool shows exactly which words it removed, keeps question words like 'how' and 'why' because they carry search intent, and never strips a slug down to nothing.

Does changing a URL slug hurt SEO?

Changing a published slug creates a brand-new URL, so the old one 404s and loses its rankings, backlinks and shares unless you set up a 301 redirect — and even then you've added a redirect hop and some risk. Treat slugs as permanent: generate a good one before publishing and leave it alone. If you must rename, 301 the old URL to the new one and update your internal links so they point directly at the new address.

How do I slugify a title with accents, emoji or special characters?

Turn on transliteration and ASCII-only mode (both default on): accented characters convert to plain equivalents (é → e, ø → o, ß → ss), emoji and symbols are stripped, ampersands become the word 'and', and apostrophes disappear cleanly so 'don't' becomes dont. Non-ASCII characters are technically legal in URLs, but they percent-encode into strings like %C3%A9 when copied or shared, which looks broken and kills clicks — plain ASCII slugs sidestep the whole problem.

Generate one slug here. Let Black & Gold SEO keep every URL healthy.

This slug generator gets a URL right before it ships — but a real site accumulates URL debt anyway: redirect chains from old renames, case-duplicate pages, orphaned URLs and slugs that no longer match their pages. Black & Gold SEO audits your entire URL structure alongside titles, metadata, schema and content, then ships the approved fixes to your site instead of handing you another spreadsheet. Plans start at $49.99/mo for one site.