SEO-Friendly URL Slug Generator

What a slug is

The slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page — in example.com/blog/how-to-bake-sourdough, the slug is how-to-bake-sourdough.

It matters for two reasons. People read URLs when deciding whether to click one, and a readable slug tells them what they will get; Google also displays the URL in results and uses the words in it as a weak relevance signal. Neither effect is dramatic, but a slug costs nothing to get right and is annoying to change later.

Rules worth following

The conventions below are close to universal, and most exist because URLs behave badly when they are broken.

• Use hyphens, not underscores. Google has treated hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners for years, so red_shoes can be read as one token.
• Lowercase everything. URL paths are case-sensitive on most servers, so /About and /about can be two pages with identical content.
• Keep it short. Three to five meaningful words is plenty. A slug is a label, not a summary.
• Describe the page, do not stuff it. Repeating a keyword in the slug does nothing, and it makes the URL look like spam to a human reader.
• No dates unless the date is the point. /2019/10/guide makes a refreshed article look stale.
• Avoid stop words only when it still reads naturally. how-to-bake-bread is better than bake-bread, even though "how to" are stop words.
• Do not change a live slug casually. Changing it breaks every existing link; if you must, redirect the old URL to the new one with a 301.

Accents and non-Latin scripts

This is worth knowing before you rely on the output. The tool removes every character outside A–Z, 0–9, underscore and space rather than transliterating it. So "café" becomes "caf", not "cafe", and a title written in Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or a CJK script will come back empty or nearly so.

If you are working in a language with accented Latin characters, replace them by hand before generating — é to e, ü to u, ñ to n — or write the slug manually. For non-Latin scripts you generally want either a proper transliteration or a slug written in Latin script that describes the page; either way, do it by hand.

Which stop words are removed

The option strips a fixed list of 24 common English words: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, he, in, is, it, its, of, on, that, the, to, was, will, with.

It is a blunt instrument, and that is fine for shortening a long title. Read the result before using it, though — removing "to" from "how to bake bread" leaves "how-bake-bread", which reads worse than the original. The option is best applied to titles that are genuinely too long, not as a default.