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Slug Generator — URL Slugify Online
Free slugify tool. Turn a title into an SEO-friendly hyphenated slug.
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Making a URL that survives being shared
A slug is part of a public URL, so it should be lowercase, stable and free of characters that need escaping. Lowercasing is not cosmetic: paths are case-sensitive on most servers while browsers and analytics tools often are not, so two links that differ only in case can become two URLs for one page.
Spaces have three plausible replacements and only one is generally safe. A hyphen reads well and is treated as a word separator, an underscore is not treated as a separator at all, and a plus sign only means a space inside a query string. Use hyphens for readable URLs unless the value is a key rather than a path.
Decide early whether a slug may ever change. Editing a published slug breaks inbound links and discards whatever search engines learned about that URL, so the durable pattern is a short readable prefix followed by a stable identifier, plus a redirect if the title is later corrected.
FAQ
- What is a slug?
- A readable URL path segment such as my-post-title.
- Do you strip accents?
- Yes — Unicode normalization removes combining marks.
- What about CJK text?
- Non alphanumeric characters become separators; pure CJK may yield an empty slug.
- Should URLs use hyphens or underscores?
- Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as part of the word, so a hyphenated slug is read as separate terms while an underscored one is not. Hyphens are also what readers already expect to see in a URL.
- Do slugs affect search rankings?
- Only slightly. Keywords in a URL are a weak signal, and a short readable slug helps people trust the link before clicking. Stability matters more than wording: changing a live slug costs more than any keyword it might have added.
- What happens to non-English characters in a slug?
- Non-ASCII letters are replaced by separators, so a title written entirely in Chinese can reduce to an empty slug. Either transliterate first, or accept a stable identifier as the slug and keep the readable title in the page heading where it still helps.