URL Slug Generator -- Clean URLs for SEO
What URL slugs are and why they matter
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. In example.com/blog/url-slug-generator, the slug is url-slug-generator. Good slugs are lowercase, use hyphens to separate words, and contain no special characters, spaces, or percent-encoded gibberish.
Slugs affect SEO directly. Search engines use the words in a URL as a ranking signal -- a page at /how-to-calculate-percentage tells Google more than /post?id=47293. Clean URLs also get higher click-through rates in search results because users can read what the page is about before clicking.
Manually converting a title like "How to Calculate Percentage Change (With Examples!)" into a clean slug means lowercasing, stripping punctuation, replacing spaces with hyphens, and removing filler words. A slug generator does all of this in one step.
How to generate a slug
- Open the URL Slug Generator.
- Paste or type your page title, article headline, or any text.
- The tool converts it to a clean, hyphenated slug instantly.
- Copy the result and use it in your CMS, router, or file name.
SEO best practices for URL slugs
- Keep it short -- aim for 3-5 words. Remove articles (a, the, an), prepositions (of, in, for), and conjunctions (and, but, or) when they do not add meaning.
- Include your target keyword -- if the page targets "color contrast checker," the slug should contain those words.
- Use hyphens, not underscores -- Google treats hyphens as word separators but treats underscores as joiners.
color-contrastis two words to Google;color_contrastis one. - Lowercase only -- URLs are case-sensitive on most servers. Mixing cases creates duplicate content risks and broken links.
- No special characters -- strip parentheses, ampersands, question marks, and other punctuation. They get percent-encoded in URLs and look messy.
- Avoid changing slugs after publishing -- a slug change is a URL change. If you must change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL.
Platform conventions
Different platforms have different slug rules:
- WordPress -- auto-generates slugs from titles, but you should manually shorten them. Defaults to hyphens.
- GitHub -- repository names act as slugs. Hyphens are conventional; underscores work but are less common.
- Next.js / file-based routing -- file names become URL paths. Name your files with slug-style conventions.
- Django -- has a built-in
SlugFieldthat enforces lowercase alphanumeric characters and hyphens.
How transliteration works
Transliteration converts non-ASCII characters to their closest ASCII equivalents. The German "Grundungsgeschichte" (with umlauts) becomes grundungsgeschichte, the French "resume" (with accents) becomes resume, and the Spanish "nino" (with tilde) becomes nino. This ensures slugs work in every browser and server without percent-encoding, while preserving the meaning of the original text as closely as possible.
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