URL Slug Generator — clean, readable URLs
Convert a title into a URL-safe slug, with optional stop-word removal.
Free and instant — results appear in seconds. No sign-up, no limits, and nothing you type is stored.
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL. Good ones are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated and descriptive enough to be understood without surrounding context.
The rule that matters more than any formatting preference: once a URL is published, changing it breaks every link pointing at it unless you add a redirect.
What gets stripped, and what to keep
Input: "How to Fix WordPress's 404 Errors — A Complete Guide (2025)"
Output: how-to-fix-wordpress-s-404-errors-a-complete-guide-202562 characters, which is longer than ideal. With stop words removed:
fix-wordpress-s-404-errors-complete-guide-202546 characters and no meaning lost.
Notice the apostrophe in "WordPress's" became a hyphen, producing the awkward wordpress-s. Worth editing by hand to wordpress — automatic conversion cannot know that the possessive s carries nothing.
This is the general point about slug generation: it gets you 90% of the way, and the last edit is a judgement call. A slug is read by people, and fix-wordpress-404-errors reads better than anything a rule can produce automatically.
On stop words: removing them shortens URLs without losing meaning, but do not remove them where they change it. how-to-quit-smoking and quit-smoking are different queries.
Formatting conventions
Hyphens, not underscores. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners, so web_hosting may be read as one token.
Lowercase throughout. URLs are case-sensitive after the domain on most servers, so /About and /about can be two pages with duplicate content.
No dates, unless it is news. /2024/03/how-to-x looks stale the following year even when the content is current.
Short. Under 60 characters. Long URLs truncate in search results and are unpleasant to share.
Words, not IDs. /products/blue-widget beats /products/8823.
Changing a published slug
The cost is real: every inbound link, bookmark and social share pointing at the old URL breaks, and the accumulated ranking signals go with it.
If you must change it, add a 301 from the old URL to the new one and leave it in place indefinitely. In WordPress, the Redirection plugin does this automatically on slug change.
The general rule is to get the slug right before publishing rather than optimising it afterwards. A slightly imperfect slug with intact links outperforms a perfect one with none.
Non-Latin scripts
Internationalised URLs are supported and display correctly in modern browsers, but they are transmitted punycode-encoded, which produces unreadable strings when copied into plain-text contexts.
For mixed audiences, transliterating to Latin characters is usually the safer choice. For a single-language audience whose script is not Latin, native characters are fine and often preferred.
Frequently asked questions
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines treat them as word separators, while underscores are treated as joining characters — so web_hosting may be read as a single token rather than two words.
Does changing a URL hurt SEO?
Yes, unless you redirect. Every inbound link, bookmark and share pointing at the old URL breaks, and accumulated ranking signals are lost with it. Always add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, and leave it in place permanently.
Should I remove stop words?
Where they add nothing, yes — it shortens URLs harmlessly. But not where they carry meaning. Removing "to" from how-to-quit-smoking leaves quit-smoking, which is a different query with different intent.
How long should a slug be?
Under 60 characters is a good working limit. Longer slugs truncate in search results and are awkward to share. Three to five meaningful words is usually enough to describe a page.
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