URL Slug Generator

What makes a good URL slug?

A slug is the human-readable tail of a URL — /blog/how-to-deploy-nextjs rather than /blog/post?id=4823. A good one is short, lowercase, ASCII-only and hyphen-separated: search engines treat hyphens as word boundaries (Google explicitly recommends them over underscores), readers can predict the content before clicking, and the link survives being pasted into chat apps, emails and terminals without percent-encoding garbage like %C3%A9. This tool applies those rules automatically and converts a whole list at once — one title per line — which is handy when migrating a blog or seeding a CMS.

How accented characters are handled

Titles like "Café Crème: A Résumé of Flavors" can't go into an ASCII slug directly. The generator first applies an explicit transliteration map for characters that have no plain-letter decomposition — ß→ss, ø→o, æ→ae, þ→th, ł→l — then uses Unicode NFD normalization to split accented letters into a base letter plus combining marks and strips the marks, turning é→e, ü→u and ñ→n. Anything still non-alphanumeric becomes the separator, runs of separators collapse to one, and leading/trailing separators are trimmed — so the example becomes cafe-creme-a-resume-of-flavors.

FAQ

Hyphens or underscores — which is better for SEO?

Hyphens. Google has long documented that it treats hyphens as word separators but may read snake_case as a single joined word. Use the underscore option only when a system requires it — some legacy CMSs, file names or identifiers — not for public web URLs.

How long should a slug be?

There's no hard limit — browsers handle thousands of characters — but short slugs are easier to share, less likely to be truncated in search results, and less brittle when the title changes. A common editorial rule is 3–6 meaningful words; set the max length slider (which cuts cleanly at a separator, never mid-word fragmenting with a trailing dash) to enforce a budget like 50 or 60 characters.

Should I change a slug after publishing?

Avoid it if you can — the URL is the page's identity for links, bookmarks and search ranking. If you must rename, keep the old URL alive with a 301 redirect to the new one so existing links and accumulated ranking signals carry over.