Slug generator: clean URL slugs, in bulk.
Paste a list of titles and get URL slugs with accents transliterated rather than stripped. The harder question is whether to change a slug at all once a page ranks.
By Mike Cecconello · Updated September 4, 2026
URL slug generator
Runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
Accents are transliterated rather than stripped, so “café” becomes cafe and not
caf, and “Straße” becomes strasse. If a page is already live and
ranking, changing its slug costs you the ranking unless you redirect it — renaming is rarely worth it.
What you can do with it
- Generate slugs for a batch of planned articles
- Normalise slugs across a multilingual site
- Shorten slugs a CMS generated from a long title
- Check that accented titles produce readable URLs
How it works, step by step
- 1
Aim for three to five meaningful words
Long enough to say what the page is, short enough to read in a search result and paste into a message without wrapping. The CMS default of slugifying the entire title is almost always too long.
- 2
Drop filler, keep meaning
Removing 'the', 'and', 'how' usually improves a slug. Removing a word that changes the subject does not — 'seo-tools' and 'free-seo-tools' are different pages.
- 3
Transliterate accents, do not strip them
'café' should become cafe, not caf. Stripping diacritics character by character silently mangles words in most European languages, and it is the most common bug in hand-rolled slug functions.
- 4
Use hyphens, lowercase, ASCII
Underscores are treated less consistently as word separators, uppercase creates duplicate-URL risk on case-sensitive servers, and non-ASCII gets percent-encoded into something unreadable when shared.
- 5
Then leave it alone
A slug is part of a URL, and a URL that ranks is an asset. Changing it means a redirect, lost link equity in the transition and a period of instability. Get it right before publishing rather than tidying it afterwards.
Slugs are a small decision you only get to make once
Almost nothing about a URL slug is high-leverage. Keyword presence is a minor signal, and readability mostly affects human click behaviour rather than a ranking calculation.
What makes slugs worth thinking about for thirty seconds is that they are close to permanent. Every other on-page element can be revised freely: titles, descriptions, headings, the copy itself. Change a URL and you have a migration, however small — a redirect to maintain, equity to pass, and links out in the world that now point one hop away from the destination.
So the goal is not the optimal slug. It is a slug you will not want to change.
What that means in practice
Use the durable subject rather than the current title. Titles acquire years, superlatives and campaign language; slugs should survive all of that. If you would have to change the slug to update the page next year, the slug is wrong now.
Keep it to the words that carry meaning. Filler words are safe to drop and their removal makes the URL scannable. Words that change the subject are not filler, even when they are short.
Transliterate rather than strip. This is where hand-written slug functions fail most often: a naïve regex that removes non-ASCII turns readable words into truncated ones, and nobody notices until a non-English page ships with a nonsense URL.
When to break the rule and rename
There is one clear case: the URL actively misrepresents the page. A slug that names a product you no longer sell, or a year on evergreen content, or a subject the page has since pivoted away from, is worth a redirect. Tidiness on its own is not.
Frequently asked questions
Do keywords in the URL help rankings?
Marginally, and less than most people assume. Google has described URL words as a very small signal. The real benefit is human: a readable URL in a search result or a shared link tells someone what they are about to open, which affects whether they click.
Should I change an existing slug to a better one?
Usually not. If the page ranks, the gain from a tidier URL is small and the cost is real: a 301, a temporary ranking wobble and any links that were never updated. Change it when the current URL is actively misleading, not because a shorter one would be nicer.
Should the slug match the title exactly?
No. Titles are written for people and often carry a year, a brand or a hook that dates badly. A slug should be the durable subject, so 'The 10 Best SEO Tools for Agencies in 2026' becomes best-seo-tools-agencies rather than carrying a year you will want to update annually.
Do dates in URLs hurt?
They constrain you. A dated URL signals age even after you refresh the content, and it makes evergreen updates feel dishonest or force a migration. For news it is fine and conventional; for evergreen content it is a cost with no matching benefit.
How do I handle non-English slugs?
Write them in the target language, transliterated to ASCII. A German page should have a German slug, because the words match what people search and what they expect to see. Avoid percent-encoded non-Latin characters where you can — they are technically valid and unreadable when shared.
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