URL Slug Generator

What a slug generator does

A slug is the readable part of a URL — the best-free-writing-tools in example.com/blog/best-free-writing-tools. A good slug is lowercase, uses hyphens between words, contains no punctuation or accents, and is short enough to read at a glance. This tool turns any title into one, and it is strict about the rules that keep URLs from breaking.

Because it runs live, you can watch the slug change as you tweak the title, which makes it easy to land on something short and clear.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your title. The slug appears immediately in the box below.
2. Adjust the options if your platform has its own conventions — some use underscores, some allow longer slugs.
3. Set a maximum length to keep long titles from producing unwieldy URLs. The tool trims at a word boundary so a slug never ends mid-word.
4. Copy the slug and paste it into your CMS.

How the slug is built

The title passes through a fixed sequence of steps, each controlled by an option:

1. Accent normalization decomposes accented letters and drops the marks, so café becomes cafe and naïve becomes naive. A handful of letters that do not decompose — ß, æ, ø, ł and their kin — are mapped by hand to ss, ae, o and l.
2. Ampersand handling optionally replaces & with the word and, so Rock & Roll becomes rock-and-roll rather than losing the symbol entirely.
3. Lowercasing is applied if enabled, because URLs are case-sensitive on many servers and mixed-case slugs cause duplicate-content headaches.
4. Character stripping removes everything that is not a letter, a number or a separator. This is what deletes commas, quotes, colons and emoji.
5. Separator collapsing converts runs of spaces, hyphens and underscores into a single separator, and trims separators from the two ends.
6. Length capping trims to your maximum at the last whole word, then removes any trailing separator.

Letters from non-Latin scripts — Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic — are kept when Remove characters that are not letters or numbers is off, because they are valid in modern URLs. Turn that option on and only ASCII letters and digits survive, which is the safest choice for maximum compatibility.

Examples

Notice that the apostrophe in you'll is removed rather than replaced with a hyphen, so the slug reads youll and not you-ll. Punctuation is deleted; only spaces and existing separators become hyphens.

Common use cases

• Blog post URLs. Generate the permalink from the headline before you publish.
• Product page addresses. Build a consistent slug from a product name.
• Documentation anchors. Create heading IDs that match your section titles.
• File names. A slug makes a safe, lowercase, space-free file name.
• API keys and identifiers that need to be human-readable but URL-safe.
• Category and tag URLs generated in bulk from a list of names.

Privacy and security

Slugs are generated in your browser. Unpublished titles and internal product names never leave your device, so there is no risk of a draft URL appearing in someone else's logs.

Your option choices are stored locally so the tool matches your platform's conventions each visit. See the privacy policy for details.