RunLocalTools

Slug Generator

Turn any title or phrase into a clean, URL-safe slug — lowercased, hyphenated, stripped of special characters and accents — instantly and locally.

What actually goes wrong when you slugify text by hand

A “slug” is the URL-friendly version of a title (turning “10 Best Coffee Shops in Austin!” into 10-best-coffee-shops-in-austin), and it sounds simple until you hit the edge cases: apostrophes, em-dashes, accented characters like é or ñ, emoji, multiple consecutive spaces, or a title that’s mostly punctuation. Handling these inconsistently across a site’s URLs creates broken links, duplicate-looking slugs that differ only by an encoded character, or URLs that look unprofessional with double hyphens or trailing dashes. This tool applies consistent, predictable rules so every slug on your site follows the same pattern.

How to use it

  1. Type or paste a title into the input field.
  2. The slug generates instantly: lowercased, spaces converted to hyphens, special characters stripped, and accented characters transliterated to their closest plain-ASCII equivalent (é becomes e, ñ becomes n) rather than simply deleted, which better preserves readability and search relevance.
  3. Toggle the separator character between hyphens (the near-universal standard) and underscores, if your specific platform expects the latter.
  4. Set a maximum length limit if your CMS or URL structure enforces one, and the tool will truncate cleanly at a word boundary rather than cutting a word in half.
  5. Use bulk mode to paste a multi-line list of titles and generate slugs for all of them at once, useful when migrating a batch of content or setting up a new site’s URL structure.
  6. A duplicate-detection option flags identical slugs within a bulk batch, which is worth catching before publishing since duplicate slugs cause real routing conflicts.

Common situations this solves

  • Generating a URL slug for a new blog post, product page, or article title before publishing, ensuring it’s clean and consistent with the rest of the site’s URLs.
  • Migrating a batch of existing content to a new platform or URL structure, where hundreds of titles need consistent slugs generated at once rather than by hand.
  • Fixing an existing slug that has grown messy over time due to title edits, ensuring it stays clean and matches the current title.
  • Creating anchor IDs for in-page navigation (like a table of contents linking to headings), which follow similar formatting rules to URL slugs.
  • Generating consistent identifiers for categories, tags, or filenames derived from human-readable labels.

Frequently asked questions

Should a slug exactly match the page title, word for word?

It doesn’t need to, and often shouldn’t — stop words (like “a,” “the,” “of”) are sometimes removed from slugs to keep them shorter and more focused on the meaningful keywords, though this is a stylistic choice rather than a hard rule. This tool preserves all words by default but includes a “remove common stop words” toggle if you prefer the shorter style.

What happens to numbers and existing hyphens in the original title?

Numbers are preserved as-is, and any hyphens already present in the title (like in “state-of-the-art”) are kept as single hyphens rather than being duplicated when the tool adds its own hyphens for spaces — the tool collapses any resulting consecutive hyphens down to one automatically.

Why does an accented character like “café” become “cafe” instead of just being deleted?

Transliterating accented characters to their closest plain-ASCII equivalent, rather than stripping them entirely, keeps the resulting slug more readable and keeps the underlying word recognizable, which matters both for human readability and because search engines can still associate the slug with the relevant keyword.

Can slugs contain uppercase letters or should they always be lowercase?

Technically URLs can contain uppercase letters, but the overwhelming convention — followed by essentially every major platform and CMS — is lowercase only, partly because some web servers treat URL paths as case-sensitive, which can create confusing duplicate-content situations if the same page is reachable at two differently-cased URLs. This tool always lowercases by default for that reason.

Is there a real risk to using very long slugs, or is it just a stylistic preference?

Extremely long slugs aren’t broken, but they’re generally worse for both usability (harder to read, share, and remember) and search visibility, since search engines tend to truncate very long URLs in search result displays. There’s no universal hard limit, but keeping slugs to roughly 3-7 meaningful words is the common practical guideline, which is why the length-limiting option exists here.

Need a tool that can turn a multi-line list of titles into URL-safe slugs, all at once? Check Out Our Bulk Slug Generator