Blog post title
Before
10 Ways to Learn Astro in 2026
After
10-ways-to-learn-astro-in-2026
Slug Generator
Turn any title, sentence, or phrase into a clean, URL-friendly slug. Handles accents, punctuation, and filler words. Everything runs in your browser, so your text stays on your device.
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your-slug-will-appear-here
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About the slug generator
What is a slug generator?
A slug generator is a free online tool that converts any text or title into a clean, URL-friendly slug. It automatically removes special characters, replaces spaces with hyphens, and converts everything to lowercase, giving you a properly formatted slug in seconds.
A slug is the part of a URL that comes after your domain name and identifies a specific page. For example, in the URL example.com/what-is-a-slug-generator, the slug is what-is-a-slug-generator. Clean slugs matter for SEO because search engines use them to understand what a page is about, and readable URLs earn more clicks in search results.
Instead of manually editing titles into URL format, a slug generator does the work instantly. Simply paste your blog post title, product name, or page heading into the tool, and it creates a short, keyword-rich slug that is safe to use on WordPress, Shopify, or any website platform. This saves time, prevents broken URLs caused by invalid characters, and helps keep your site structure consistent.
Why use our slug generator
- ·Free. No signup, no paywall, no limits.
- ·Runs in your browser. Nothing gets uploaded, your text stays with you.
- ·Handles accents. Café becomes cafe. Piñata becomes pinata.
- ·Flexible. Pick a separator, cap the length, drop filler words.
- ·Instant. Every keystroke updates the slug immediately.
Examples
Product name
Before
Peartools' Free Slug Generator!
After
peartools-free-slug-generator
With accents
Before
Café au lait, s'il vous plaît
After
cafe-au-lait-sil-vous-plait
Filler words trimmed
Before
The Story of a Boy and His Dog
After
story-boy-his-dog
Question headline
Before
How do I fix a leaky faucet?
After
how-do-i-fix-a-leaky-faucet
News style
Before
Breaking: Local Team Wins 5-0 in Overtime
After
breaking-local-team-wins-5-0-in-overtime
When you'd use this
Blog and article URLs
Turn a post title into a clean, readable path. Search engines and readers both prefer short, keyword-rich URLs over cryptic query strings, and a good slug still makes sense when someone copies it into a chat message with no preview.
E-commerce product pages
Give every product a URL that describes what it actually is. A slug like blue-canvas-tote-bag reads better than a numeric ID, ranks for more long-tail queries, and gives shoppers confidence about where the link leads.
File and folder names
Generate safe names for downloads, exports, or repo folders. No spaces, no odd punctuation, and nothing that will trip up a shell script, a cron job, or a teammate on a different operating system.
Database identifiers
Create stable keys from human-readable input. Useful for slugs on products, users, categories, or any record that needs a friendly ID that stays the same even if the display title later gets edited for style.
CSS class and component names
Convert a component or section name into a valid, kebab-cased class. Consistent naming keeps your stylesheets easy to scan, works well with BEM, and avoids the invisible bugs that come from extra spaces or capital letters.
Anchor links and doc headings
Build clean anchors for tables of contents and deep links. A predictable slug means readers can guess a section URL, and it survives copy-paste into Slack or email without getting mangled.
Slug best practices
A few small habits keep your URLs clean, easy to find, and built to last. These are the rules of thumb we've picked up from years of shipping web content.
Keep it short
Aim for three to five meaningful words. Long slugs get truncated in search results and shared previews, and they feel spammy to click. If your title is long, trim it to the keywords that actually matter to the reader.
Front-load the keyword
Search engines and human eyes both give more weight to the first words in a slug. If a post is about kitchen knife sharpening, lead with that, not with a filler word like the or best.
Stick with hyphens
Google has said for years that hyphens are treated as word separators while underscores are not. Unless you have a specific reason to use dots or underscores, hyphens are the safe default.
Lowercase everything
Most servers treat /My-Page and /my-page as different URLs, which quietly splits your traffic and your backlinks. Lowercase slugs sidestep the whole issue and look cleaner in the address bar.
Do not change published slugs
Once a URL is live, it collects links, bookmarks, and search rankings. If you must rename it, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one so you do not lose that hard-earned traffic.
Avoid stop words when it helps
Removing the, a, and of can make a slug punchier, but do not force it if the result reads oddly. Slugs are for humans first, robots second.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a slug?
- A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies a page. For example, in peartools.com/text-tools/slug-generator the slug is slug-generator. Slugs are usually all lowercase, use hyphens between words, and contain only characters that are safe in a URL.
- What makes a good slug?
- A good slug is short, descriptive, all lowercase, uses hyphens between words, and contains only ASCII letters, digits, and safe characters. It should read like a compressed version of the page title so both people and search engines can tell what the page is about at a glance.
- Are slugs important for SEO?
- A clear, keyword-focused slug reinforces the topic of a page and gives search engines an extra signal about relevance. It also improves click-through rate, because a URL like /how-to-sharpen-a-knife is more inviting than /post?id=8471. Slugs are not a magic ranking button, but they are low effort and high polish.
- Should I use hyphens or underscores?
- Hyphens. Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as part of a single word, so hello-world reads as two words while hello_world reads as one. Unless you are generating a filename for a system that requires underscores, hyphens are the standard choice for URLs.
- Does it handle accented characters and non-Latin scripts?
- Accented Latin letters like é, ñ, ü, and ç are normalized to their plain ASCII equivalents so the slug stays URL-safe. Non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, or Cyrillic are not transliterated, since there is no universally correct way to do so. For those, you can transliterate first and then paste the result into the generator.
- Why remove common filler words?
- Words like the, a, of, and for add length without adding meaning. Removing them makes slugs shorter and more keyword-focused, which some teams prefer for SEO and readability. It is optional, and you can leave the toggle off if you want the slug to match the original phrasing.
- Can I use a different separator?
- Yes. Hyphens are the default and most common choice for URLs, but you can switch to underscores for filenames or dots for domain-style identifiers. Pick whatever fits the system you are pasting the slug into.
- What about numbers, dates, and years?
- Numbers pass through untouched, so titles like 10 Best Books in 2026 become 10-best-books-in-2026. That is usually what you want. If a slug will still be relevant in five years, consider leaving the year out so the URL does not feel stale later.
- Can I change a slug after it is published?
- You can, but be careful. Every published URL collects backlinks, bookmarks, and search rankings, and changing it breaks all of them. If you rename a slug, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so visitors and search engines land in the right place.
- Is the slug generator free?
- Yes. No signup, no limits, no watermarks. Use it as often as you like.
- Is my text safe?
- Your text never leaves your browser. All conversions run on your device, so nothing is uploaded to a server and nothing is stored.
- Does it work offline?
- Once the page is loaded, you can keep using it offline. Slug generation is pure JavaScript that runs in your browser, no network round-trip required.