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URL slug generator
Paste a headline. Get a clean, lower-case, hyphen-separated URL slug ready to ship.
Slug
how-ai-changing-seo-2026Tip: keep slugs 3–6 words and avoid dates so a refreshed article keeps the same URL.
Quick answer
What is a URL slug generator?
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page - the 'url-slug-generator' in /tools/url-slug-generator. This permalink generator takes a headline and returns a clean slug: lowercased, accents transliterated, punctuation and quotes removed, everything joined with hyphens, with optional stop-word stripping. It updates as you type, so you can see what a title becomes before you commit the URL.
What makes a slug good
Short, descriptive, and stable. Three to six words is the range worth aiming for: long enough that the URL says what the page is, short enough to survive being pasted into a message, read aloud on a call, or shown truncated in a search result. Google has said words in the URL are a very small ranking factor, but the URL is visible in results and in every share, and a readable one earns clicks that /p?id=48213 does not.
Use hyphens, never underscores - search engines treat hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners, so seo_tools reads as one token. Keep it all lowercase; some servers treat /SEO-Tools and /seo-tools as two distinct pages, which is a duplicate-content problem you never need to have.
Stop words, dates, and the WordPress permalink structure
The stop-word toggle strips a, an, the, of, for, to, in, on, and similar. Turn it on by default: 'how-to-choose-an-seo-tool-for-a-small-agency' becomes 'how-choose-seo-tool-small-agency' with no loss of meaning. Turn it off when removal breaks the phrase - 'war-of-the-roses' and 'war-roses' are not the same thing, and product names that contain a stop word must keep it.
Keep dates out of slugs. WordPress ships with a Day and name permalink structure that produces /2026/08/01/your-post/, which is fine for a news site and actively harmful for evergreen content: the URL announces the age of an article you intend to keep updating, and the moment you refresh it the date is a lie you cannot fix without a redirect. In WordPress, Settings then Permalinks, choose Post name - do this before you publish, because changing it later rewrites every existing URL on the site.
Changing a slug on a page that is already live
A URL that has been indexed, linked to, or shared is an asset. Changing it creates a new page at the new address and a 404 at the old one, and the rankings and link equity attached to it are in limbo until search engines reconcile the two.
If you must change it, ship a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one as part of the same change, update internal links to point at the new URL directly rather than through the redirect, and resubmit your sitemap. The honest rule: fix a slug in the first days after publishing while it is cheap, and after that only when the URL is actively wrong.
Accents, non-Latin scripts, and transliteration
The generator normalises Unicode and strips combining marks, so cafe with an accent becomes cafe and Munchen with an umlaut becomes munchen. Anything outside a-z and 0-9 becomes a hyphen. That is right for Latin scripts with diacritics and wrong for Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and CJK, whose characters are simply removed, leaving a mangled or empty slug.
For non-Latin content, either write a transliterated slug by hand or use the native script directly. Browsers and search engines handle percent-encoded UTF-8 slugs correctly and display them decoded - just be aware that pasted into a plain-text context, such a URL appears as a wall of percent codes.
Where this data comes from
Slugs are generated in your browser. The input is trimmed, normalised to Unicode NFKD form so accented characters separate from their combining marks, and those marks are removed. Straight and curly quotes and apostrophes are deleted rather than hyphenated so 'don't' becomes 'dont'. Every remaining run of non-alphanumeric characters becomes a single hyphen, leading and trailing hyphens are trimmed, and - if enabled - a fixed English stop-word list is filtered out segment by segment. Lowercasing is optional but on by default.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a URL slug be?
Three to six words is a good working range. The slug should describe the page well enough to be understood out of context, without carrying the full headline. Very long slugs get truncated in search results and are awkward to share; very short ones lose meaning. Length itself is not a ranking factor - clarity and stability are what matter.
Should I remove stop words from my permalink?
Usually yes. Words like the, of, for and to add length without adding meaning, and stripping them makes the URL cleaner. Keep them when removal changes or breaks the phrase - titles containing a proper name, a product name, or an idiom where the stop word is load-bearing should keep it. The toggle here lets you compare both versions instantly.
Should I put the date in my URL?
Not for evergreen content. A dated permalink advertises the article's age and becomes inaccurate the moment you update it, and removing the date later means redirecting every URL on the site. WordPress users should set Settings then Permalinks to Post name before publishing anything. News sites are the reasonable exception, since recency is the point there.
What happens if I change the slug of a published page?
The old URL starts returning 404 and every external link, bookmark and share pointing at it breaks, along with the rankings attached to it. Always add a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one as part of the same change, then update internal links to target the new URL directly and resubmit your sitemap. Expect some ranking fluctuation while it is recrawled.
Can a slug contain accents or non-English characters?
Technically yes - browsers and search engines handle percent-encoded UTF-8 slugs correctly. This generator transliterates Latin diacritics (cafe, munchen) and strips characters outside a-z and 0-9 entirely, so Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and CJK titles need either a hand-written transliteration or the native script used directly in your CMS.
Do keywords in the URL help SEO?
Marginally. Google has described words in the URL as a very small ranking signal. The larger effect is behavioural: a descriptive URL is more clickable in search results, more trustworthy when pasted into a message, and easier for people to link to with accurate anchor text. Include the main term naturally, then stop - stuffing the slug helps nothing.
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