URL Slug Generator

A slug is the readable part of a URL that names a page, such as trail-running-shoes in example.com/guides/trail-running-shoes. The slug generator turns a title or phrase into a clean slug: lowercase, accents transliterated (é becomes e), apostrophes dropped, punctuation and spaces turned into single hyphens, and leading or trailing hyphens trimmed. It can also remove common stop words and cut long slugs at a word boundary.

Google recommends simple, descriptive URLs with words separated by hyphens, because hyphens are read as word separators while underscores can join words together. A good slug tells people and search engines what the page is about before they click, and it shows up in the breadcrumb-style URL in search results. Short slugs are easier to share and less likely to be cut off.

Slugs matter most when a page is created. Changing the URL of a page that already ranks means the new URL has to be crawled and indexed again, and you must 301-redirect the old one to keep its links. Small improvements to an existing slug are rarely worth that, so get it right the first time.