A slug is the readable tail of a URL — the part after the domain that tells humans and search engines what the page is. WordPress generates one from your title, but it keeps accents, mangles ñ and ß, and happily produces 90-character monsters stuffed with filler words. This slug generator does the job properly: paste any title, in any language, and get a clean lowercase slug with accents transliterated, punctuation stripped, and — if you want — English stop words removed and a length cap applied at a word boundary.
Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded. ¿Necesitas la versión en español? Ya existe en el sitio: Conversor de Texto Plano a Formato Slug URL.
What makes a good slug
A good slug is short, lowercase, hyphen-separated and keyword-bearing. It should survive being read aloud over the phone and being pasted into an email without breaking. Four rules cover almost everything: use hyphens, not underscores (Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners); drop accents and special letters by transliterating them (café → cafe, ñoquis → noquis, straße → strasse), because raw accented characters get percent-encoded into unreadable %C3%B1 sequences; remove filler words like “the”, “and” and “how” when the slug gets long — they add length, not meaning; and keep the whole thing under roughly 50–60 characters so it displays fully in search results and stays shareable.
This generator applies those rules in the same order WordPress developers apply them in code: special-letter mapping first (ß, æ, œ, ø, ł and friends, which Unicode decomposition alone cannot handle), then accent stripping via Unicode NFD normalization, then punctuation removal, then the optional stop-word pass and length cap. The cap is word-aware: it cuts at the last separator before the limit instead of slicing a word in half.
Worked examples
“How to Make the BEST Sourdough Bread (Step-by-Step Guide!)” becomes how-to-make-the-best-sourdough-bread-step-by-step-guide — and with stop words removed, make-best-sourdough-bread-step-by-step-guide. “Cómo hacer café con ñoquis — ¡receta fácil!” becomes como-hacer-cafe-con-noquis-receta-facil: accents gone, the inverted exclamation mark gone, the em dash collapsed. “Über den Wolken: Æther & Öl” becomes uber-den-wolken-aether-and-ol.
Slug mistakes that quietly cost traffic
Three errors show up on almost every site audit. First, keyword repetition: /best-best-cheap-flights-cheapest/ reads as spam to humans and filters alike. Second, keeping CMS defaults with IDs and dates baked in (/2024/03/12/post-4821/), which tell the reader nothing and date the content instantly. Third, changing slugs during a redesign without a redirect map — the single most destructive item on this list, because every external link earned over years starts returning 404 the same afternoon. Generate clean slugs at birth, redirect religiously when you must change them, and the URL layer never needs an audit again.
Slugs in WordPress, and when to change one
In WordPress the slug is the last field to finalize before publishing: write the post, let this tool clean the title, and paste the result into the permalink field. Change a live slug only with a 301 redirect from the old URL — a slug change without a redirect breaks every existing link, share and ranking signal pointing at the page. For an established site, a prettier slug is almost never worth that risk; for a new page, thirty seconds with a generator prevents the ugly default forever.
Frequently asked questions
Hyphens or underscores? Hyphens. Google has recommended hyphens as word separators for years; underscores are read as one joined word.
Should the slug contain the keyword? Yes, naturally — the slug is the one part of the URL every reader sees. Keyword-stuffed slugs (best-cheap-free-online-tool-now) look spammy and get truncated anyway.
Numbers and dates? Avoid dates unless the content is genuinely time-bound: a slug with “2024” ages the page forever, even after you update the content.
What about non-Latin scripts? This tool transliterates Latin-script accents and special letters. For Cyrillic, Greek or CJK titles, most CMSs percent-encode or romanize with their own tables — check your platform’s behaviour before publishing.
Related tools
Versión en español: Conversor de Texto Plano a Formato Slug URL SEO Amigable para WordPress y Blogs · Meta Description Checker · Google SERP Preview Tool.
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