URL Slug Generator — Free Online Slug Creator (2026)

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that describes a page. Inhttps://example.com/blog/how-to-bake-bread, the slug is how-to-bake-bread. Good slugs are short, keyword-rich, and free of spaces, special characters, and accents. Creating them manually is tedious — especially when dealing with apostrophes, accented letters, stop words, and length limits. A slug generator handles all of that automatically.

What Makes a Good URL Slug?

Hyphen vs Underscore: Why It Matters for SEO

Google's documentation explicitly recommends hyphens over underscores for URL slugs. The reason is how Google's indexing pipeline tokenises words: hyphens are treated as word separators (like a space), while underscores join adjacent words into a single token.

Use underscores only if your platform or codebase has a specific convention that requires them (for example, some legacy Python frameworks use snake_case URLs). For all general web content, hyphens are the correct choice.

Stop Words in URL Slugs

Stop words are common words that carry little search intent — articles (a, an, the), prepositions (of, in, to, for), and conjunctions (and, or, but). Removing them makes slugs shorter and more keyword-focused.

Example: “How to Write a Cover Letter for a Job Application”

• With stop words: how-to-write-a-cover-letter-for-a-job-application (49 chars)
• Without stop words: write-cover-letter-job-application (34 chars)

Both rank equally well because search engines already strip stop words during indexing. The shorter version is easier to share and read. The generator's stop word list includes 35+ common English words and can be extended with custom stop words.

Accented Characters and Transliteration

Accented characters (é, ñ, ü, ç, ø, etc.) are technically valid in URLs under RFC 3986, but they must be percent-encoded, which makes slugs look likecaf%C3%A9-au-lait— ugly, fragile, and platform-dependent. Transliterating accented characters to ASCII equivalents before generating the slug prevents all of this:

Case Format Options

While lowercase is correct for URL slugs, the generator also supports other case formats for generating identifiers in code:

Max Length: How Long Should a Slug Be?

Google does not impose a hard limit on URL slug length, but shorter is generally better:

• Under 50 characters — ideal. Fits comfortably in search result snippets and is easy to copy and share.
• 50–75 characters — acceptable. Might be truncated in some UI contexts.
• Over 75 characters — avoid. Long slugs are hard to read, often contain redundant words, and can be penalised by some CMS platforms.

The generator defaults to a 50-character max. Adjust it under Settings if your CMS or API has a different constraint. You can also add a prefix or suffix (e.g., a category prefix like blog-or a year suffix like -2026) directly in the tool settings.

Common Use Cases

• Blog posts — convert your article title to a permalink before publishing. Most CMSs (WordPress, Ghost, Contentful) accept slugs directly in the URL field.
• E-commerce products — generate consistent slugs for product names. Important for Shopify, WooCommerce, and headless commerce platforms where clean URLs improve organic traffic.
• CMS content migration — when migrating content between platforms, batch-generate slugs for all post titles to ensure consistency and avoid redirect chains.
• CSS class names and IDs — use snake_case or kebab-case output to generate component names or utility class names from design token labels.
• Database column names — use snake_case output to convert human-readable field labels to valid database identifiers.
• Internationalisation — transliterate non-Latin titles (French, German, Nordic languages) to ASCII slugs that work on all servers regardless of locale settings.