URL Slug Generator — Slugify Any Title

What's a URL slug?

A slug is the readable, human-friendly portion of a URL — the bit after the domain and any directory path that identifies the specific page. For an article titled "How to Compress PNG Files in 2026", a good slug is how-to-compress-png-files-in-2026. URLs should be readable, memorable, all-lowercase, dash-separated and free of special characters and accents. That's what this tool produces.

Why does the slug matter? SEO benefit (Google reads URL words as a ranking signal), shareability (people remember and trust readable URLs more than random IDs), accessibility (screen readers say the slug aloud when reading a link), and aesthetics (a clean URL signals a well-engineered site).

What this slugifier does

• Lowercases everything (URLs should be lowercase by convention).
• Replaces spaces and punctuation with your chosen separator (dash by default).
• Strips diacritics — "café" becomes "cafe", "naïve" becomes "naive". Internationalisation-safe URLs.
• Removes all non-alphanumeric characters except the separator.
• Collapses consecutive separators — "foo--bar" becomes "foo-bar".
• Trims leading and trailing separators.
• Optionally removes stop words ("a", "the", "of", "in" etc.) for tighter slugs.

Slug best practices

• Keep slugs short. Google truncates long URLs in search results. Aim for under 60 characters.
• Include the primary keyword. If your post targets "compress PNG", your slug should contain those words.
• Use dashes, not underscores. Google explicitly says dashes are word separators; underscores are treated as part of the same word.
• Lowercase only. Mixed-case URLs cause duplicate-content issues — /About and /about can resolve as two pages.
• Don't change slugs after publishing. If you must, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one.
• Drop dates if not needed. Including "2026" in the slug means it'll feel stale by 2027 unless you commit to updating it.
• Skip stop words for very tight slugs — "guide-to-the-best-laptops" becomes "guide-best-laptops". Less natural, more concise.

Underscores vs. dashes

Use dashes. Google's John Mueller has confirmed many times that compress-png reads as two words, while compress_png reads as a single word. Dashes are the universal URL standard. Underscores are only correct for file names and programming identifiers (snake_case), not URLs.

Stop words

Stop words are common short words that carry little semantic meaning — articles ("a", "the"), conjunctions ("and", "or"), prepositions ("of", "in", "on"). Modern search engines effectively ignore them, so removing them from a slug doesn't hurt SEO and can make the URL more compact. But: removing stop words can change meaning. "ways to win" → "ways-win" loses something. Use the option only when the result still reads clearly.

FAQs about URL slugs

Related text tools