Answer: The Slug Generator produces your output instantly from the input you provide — everything runs in your browser, free, with no signup required.
Turn any title into a clean, shareable URL slug as you type
| System | Separator | Case | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Hyphen | Lowercase | sanitize_title strips most punctuation; the post_name field holds 200 characters |
| Django | Hyphen | Lowercase | slugify default; SlugField caps at 50 chars and ASCII unless allow_unicode is set |
| Laravel | Hyphen | Lowercase | Str::slug transliterates accents first, then hyphenates |
| Rails | Hyphen | Lowercase | String#parameterize; older versions used a double dash |
| GitHub repos | Free-form | Preserved | Letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, periods; up to 100 characters |
| Common SEO practice | Hyphen | Lowercase | 3-5 words, roughly 60 characters or fewer |
The defaults above match what WordPress and Laravel produce, which is also what most CMSs and static site generators expect when you paste a slug into a permalink field.
| Title you type | Setting | Slug produced | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rock & Roll Hall of Fame | Default | rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame | & becomes the word "and" |
| Don't Panic: A Beginner's Guide | Default | dont-panic-a-beginners-guide | Apostrophes vanish instead of leaving a stray hyphen |
| Crème Brûlée Recipe | Default | creme-brulee-recipe | Accents stripped (è → e, û → u) |
| Multiple Spaces Here | Default | multiple-spaces-here | Runs of spaces collapse to one hyphen; edges trimmed |
| Why Émojis 🚀 Break URLs?! | Default | why-emojis-break-urls | Emoji and punctuation dropped, capitals lowercased |
| The Best Way to Learn Python in 2026 | Drop stopwords | best-way-learn-python-2026 | "the", "to" and "in" removed |
| The Best Way to Learn Python in 2026 | Max length 20 | the-best-way-to | Trimmed back to the last whole word |
| How to Name Files | Underscore | how_to_name_files | Same rules, different separator |
| Straße und Größe | Default | stra-e-und-gro-e | ß has no accent to strip, so it's treated as a separator; type "ss" yourself |
Every output above was produced by the same code that runs on this page. The last row shows the one case worth checking by hand: letters that aren't accented Latin characters get removed rather than transliterated.
Google says so directly. Its URL structure documentation recommends hyphens instead of underscores to separate words, because hyphens help users and search engines identify the concepts in a URL. Readability matters too. An underscore disappears under a hyperlink's underline, so best_hiking_boots can look like best hiking boots with the spaces missing. Keep underscores for file names and code identifiers, where the convention is already set.
Sometimes. Dropping a, the, and of shortens a long headline without losing meaning, and best-way-learn-python still reads fine. But some phrases fall apart without them. The Who becomes who, and how-to-tie-a-tie turns into the clumsy how-tie-tie. That's why the stopword option here is off by default. Turn it on for long titles, then read the result out loud before you use it.
Only if the old one is actually wrong or misleading. Once a URL is live, other sites link to it, people bookmark it, and search engines index it. If you do change it, set up a permanent server-side redirect from the old address to the new one. Google recommends HTTP 301 or 308 redirects and suggests keeping them for at least a year so its crawlers can move signals to the new URL. Leaving them in place forever is safer for visitors. Tweaking a slug just to squeeze in a keyword rarely pays off.
WordPress creates the slug from your post title when you first save a draft, and you can edit it in the permalink field before publishing. It's stored in the post_name column, which is a varchar(200), so very long slugs get cut short. Django's SlugField defaults to 50 characters, which is a lot tighter. If your platform caps length, put that number in the max-length box above and the tool will trim at a word boundary instead of mid-word.
URLs can carry non-ASCII text, but only in encoded form. Google's documentation says characters outside the ASCII range should be percent-encoded, so a two-character Japanese word turns into a string of %E6-style bytes on the wire even when the browser bar shows it nicely. This generator is built for Latin-script titles. It strips accents and drops everything else, so 東京 Travel Guide comes out as travel-guide. For Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, or other scripts, either write a short English or romanized slug yourself or keep the native text and let your CMS encode it. The URL encoder shows exactly what that encoded form looks like.
A slug has one job: compress a human title into characters that are safe in every browser, server, and printer along the way. That means lowercase ASCII letters, digits, and one separator. Everything else either disappears or becomes the separator.
Step by step: normalize and strip accents (Résumé → Resume), lowercase everything, drop apostrophes so Home's becomes homes, turn ampersands into the word and, then replace every remaining run of non-alphanumeric characters — spaces, punctuation, emoji — with a single hyphen. Optional stopword removal deletes filler words like a, the, and of, and the max-length option trims at the last full word rather than cutting mid-word.
Paste or type a title and the slug updates on every keystroke. Switch to underscores if you're naming a file or a wiki page. Set a max length when a CMS or database column caps you. Tick the stopword box for long headline-style titles. The copy button puts the finished slug on your clipboard, ready for a permalink field.
Take 10 Tips for a Better Café Résumé in 2026!. The accents strip first: Cafe, Resume. Lowercased, the spaces and the exclamation mark collapse into hyphens, and the result is 10-tips-for-a-better-cafe-resume-in-2026 — 40 characters, 8 words, valid in any URL bar exactly as written.
Punctuation-heavy titles behave the same way. C++ für Anfänger: Teil #2 loses its umlaut (für → fur), and the ++, colon, and # each become a single hyphen: c-fur-anfanger-teil-2. Nothing is left that a browser would have to percent-encode.
The slug is the last, human-readable segment of a URL — in toolaspect.com/slug-generator/, the slug is slug-generator. It identifies the page and, unlike an ID or a query string, tells people and search engines what the page is about.
Three to five words is the sweet spot, and staying under about 60 characters keeps the full URL from being cut off in search results. Longer slugs work, but every extra word dilutes the keywords that matter and makes the link harder to share.
Hyphens. They are the universal convention for public URLs — WordPress, Django, Laravel, and Rails all build hyphenated slugs by default, and Google has historically treated the hyphen as a word separator. Underscores survive in technical corners like wiki page names and file names, not marketing URLs.
Modestly, and mostly through keyword relevance. A descriptive slug that matches the search phrase helps users and reinforces what the page is about; a bloated or cryptic one hurts click-through. Changing a slug later breaks links unless you set up a redirect, so it pays to get it right at publish time.
Accented characters, spaces, apostrophes, ampersands, emoji, and most punctuation — all of them force percent-encoding into the URL and make it ugly and error-prone. Dates and version numbers are worth avoiding in evergreen content too, since they make a still-useful page look stale.
Yes, but add a permanent 301 or 308 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Google recommends keeping that redirect for at least a year so links and ranking signals carry over. Without it, every existing link to the page returns a 404.
It can, but non-ASCII characters are percent-encoded in the actual URL, so they turn into long %XX sequences when copied or shared. This tool strips accents and removes non-Latin characters, so for other scripts you'll usually want a short romanized or English slug instead.