Slug Generator
A slug is the URL-friendly part of a web address — the bit after your domain, like the coffee-shops-in-new-york inyoursite.com/coffee-shops-in-new-york. Type or paste any title below and this tool instantly turns it into a clean, lowercase, hyphen-separated slug ready to drop into a URL.
Separator
Why This Tool Matters
A blogger finishes writing a post titled "10 Best Coffee Shops in New York!" and needs a URL that doesn't include the exclamation point or capital letters. An e-commerce seller is adding fifty new product pages and needs every URL formatted the same way, without typos or inconsistent casing creeping in one by one. A developer is generating slugs for a CMS or database and wants a predictable, repeatable rule instead of hand-editing each string. This tool handles the lowercasing, character stripping, and hyphenation in one step, so every slug comes out clean and consistent — no manual typing, no guesswork.
Hyphen versus underscore isn't just a style preference — Google has said its systems treat a hyphen as a word separator but generally read an underscore as joining the words on either side into one token. That means "coffee-shop-menu" is understood as three separate, individually searchable words, while "coffee_shop_menu" risks being read closer to one long word. It's a small detail that only matters for SEO, which is why this tool defaults to hyphens but still offers underscores for slugs that are only ever used internally, like a database key or a file name.
How to Use
- 01
Type your title
Type or paste a title or phrase into the box above.
- 02
Pick a separator
Choose hyphen or underscore — hyphen is the SEO standard.
- 03
Copy the slug
Copy the generated slug and drop it straight into your URL.
More Text Tools
- Try the full Case Converter
- Need to check title length instead? Try the Word Counter
- Need to escape special characters in a URL instead? Try URL Encode
- Need to strip punctuation elsewhere? Try Remove Punctuation from Text
- Cleaning up markup instead? Try Remove HTML Tags
- Need to strip numbers instead? Try Remove Numbers from Text
- Browse all Text Analysis Tools
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL slug?
Hyphens. Google explicitly treats a hyphen as a word separator when indexing a URL, but treats an underscore as joining two words together — so "coffee-shops" is read as two words while "coffee_shops" can be read as one. Hyphen is the default here for that reason; underscore is offered for cases like matching an existing database or file-naming convention.
Does this remove stop words like "a," "the," or "and"?
No. This tool only lowercases, strips special characters, and swaps spaces for your chosen separator — it keeps every word you typed, including short connector words. If you want a shorter slug, remove stop words from the title yourself before generating it.
Will this handle special characters like accented letters (é, ñ, ü)?
Yes. Accented letters are converted to their closest plain-ASCII equivalent — é becomes e, ñ becomes n, ü becomes u — instead of being stripped out entirely, so a title like "Café à Paris" becomes "cafe-a-paris" rather than losing those words altogether.
Is there an ideal length for a URL slug for SEO?
Shorter is generally better — most guidance suggests keeping a slug well under 60 characters so it displays cleanly in search results and stays easy to read and share. There’s no strict cutoff, though, and a clear, descriptive slug that runs a bit longer usually beats an unclear one that’s artificially short.
Does this guarantee my slug is unique on my site?
No — this tool only formats the text you give it; it has no way to know what other URLs already exist on your site. If two different posts produce the same slug (say, two articles both titled "2024 Recap"), your CMS or database is what needs to catch that collision, typically by appending a number or a short suffix to keep the second one unique.