Slug Generator

Turning a headline into a clean URL slug

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page, like the my-first-post in example.com/blog/my-first-post. A slug generator takes a messy title and reduces it to something safe for a URL: lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens, with everything else stripped or replaced. The goal is a slug that stays readable, survives copy-paste into chat apps, and does not need percent-encoding.

What the conversion does step by step

The title is lowercased, accented characters are folded to their plain ASCII form (so Café becomes cafe), spaces and punctuation collapse into single hyphens, and leading or trailing hyphens are trimmed. Diacritic stripping matters because a raw é in a URL turns into an ugly %C3%A9 sequence that breaks readability and sometimes breaks link previews.

Example

Input title:

  10 Café Tips & Tricks for 2024!  

Generated slug:

10-cafe-tips-tricks-for-2024

FAQ

Should I keep stop words like "and" or "the"? It is a style choice. Shorter slugs read better in search results, but removing words can change meaning. Most tools keep them unless you ask to drop them.

What about non-Latin scripts? Pure transliteration of Cyrillic or CJK is lossy and often undesirable. Many teams keep the original characters and let the browser encode them, since modern URLs handle Unicode fine.

How do I avoid duplicate slugs? Append a short numeric suffix like -2 on collision, or prefix with a stable ID. Never silently overwrite an existing slug that is already indexed. See the word counter if you also need to keep titles within a length budget.