URL Slug Generator
Turn any title into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug. Strips special characters and diacritics, swaps spaces for separators, and updates live as you type.
What is a URL slug?
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page, usually appearing after the domain and any folders. In toolbali.com/utilities/slug-generator, the slug is slug-generator. A good slug is short, descriptive, lowercase, and uses hyphens to separate words so both people and search engines can understand what the page is about at a glance.
This tool converts any title or sentence into a clean slug: it lowercases the text, replaces spaces with your chosen separator, removes punctuation and special characters, strips accents and diacritics (so café becomes cafe), collapses repeated separators, and trims them from the ends.
Why SEO-friendly slugs matter
Best practice: keep slugs short (3–5 meaningful words), use hyphens rather than underscores or spaces, stick to lowercase, and drop stop words like "the" or "a" when they add no value. Once a URL is live, avoid changing its slug — if you must, set up a redirect to preserve links and rankings.
Frequently asked questions
What does this slug generator do?
It takes any title or text and converts it into a clean URL slug: lowercase letters, spaces replaced by a separator, special characters and punctuation removed, accented letters simplified, and repeated separators collapsed. You can change the separator, turn lowercasing off, and cap the length.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?
Hyphens are the recommended choice. Google treats hyphens as word separators, so best-kerala-beaches is read as three words, while best_kerala_beaches may be read as one. Use underscores only if a specific platform requires them.
Why are accents and special characters removed?
Characters like é, ñ, &, or ! are either invalid in clean URLs or get percent-encoded into hard-to-read sequences. This tool converts diacritics to their plain ASCII form (café to cafe) and strips other symbols so the slug stays simple and shareable.
How long should a URL slug be?
Shorter is usually better. Aim for around 3 to 5 meaningful words. Use the max length option to trim long titles; the tool cuts at the limit and removes any trailing separator so the slug never ends with a dash or underscore.
Can I change a slug after publishing the page?
You can, but it is best avoided. Changing a live slug breaks existing links and can lose accumulated SEO value. If you must change it, configure a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.