What is a URL slug?
A slug is the last part of a web address that identifies a page, such as url-slug-guide in example.com/blog/url-slug-guide/. It should describe the page in a few words, so people and search engines can read it before they click.
How the Slug Generator builds a slug
- The title is converted to lowercase.
- Accented Latin letters lose their accents, and special letters are mapped: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, ø becomes o. German umlauts become ae, oe and ue when the text language is German.
- Cyrillic and Greek letters are transliterated into Latin letters.
- "&" becomes the word for "and" in the text language.
- Everything that is not a letter or a digit becomes a separator, repeated separators collapse, and separators at the start and end are removed.
| Title | Slug |
|---|---|
| How to Write a Cover Letter (2026) | how-to-write-a-cover-letter-2026 |
| Fish & Chips: The Best Recipe | fish-and-chips-the-best-recipe |
| Crème brûlée, step by step | creme-brulee-step-by-step |
Slug best practices
- Keep it short and descriptive. Two to five meaningful words usually beat a full sentence. The tool keeps every word you give it, so shorten the title first if you want a shorter slug.
- Use hyphens between words. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators; underscores are better kept for file names. See Hyphen vs Dash for the punctuation itself.
- Drop filler words such as "the" and "a" when the meaning survives, and avoid dates unless the page is date-specific.
- Do not change a live slug without a 301 redirect from the old address, or you lose the page's links and traffic.
Limits
The generator converts text; it does not check whether a slug is already used on your site, and it does not shorten titles or remove stop words for you. It works for languages written in Latin, Cyrillic and Greek letters. Scripts without letter case, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Thai or Chinese, are not handled by this tool, and a title in such a script produces an empty slug. To tidy a title first, use the Text Cleaner or the Case Converter.