Gera Tools

Slug From Title

Turn a headline into a short, clean URL slug.

Free slug-from-title tool that converts article headlines into clean URL slugs, with optional stop-word removal and a max-word limit. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Last updated Source: Gera Tools

How is this different from a plain slugifier?

It is tuned for titles: alongside lowercasing and hyphenating, you can cap the number of words and drop common stop words like "the", "a" and "of" to keep blog URLs short and readable.

Turn headlines into short, clean slugs

Paste a blog post or page title and get a tidy, URL-safe slug back. Unlike a plain slugifier, this tool is tuned for headlines — it can cap the length and drop filler words so permalinks stay short and readable. It is for bloggers, CMS users and developers generating permalinks from titles.

How it works

The title is normalised in a few steps:

  1. Lowercase the whole string.
  2. Fold accents to plain ASCII (é → e, ñ → n) so the slug is URL-safe.
  3. Strip punctuation and split into words.
  4. Optionally remove stop words like the, a, of and for. If removing them would leave nothing, the original words are kept instead.
  5. Optionally cap the slug to the first N words.
  6. Join the words with your chosen separator — a hyphen or underscore.

Worked example

The title “10 Tips for Writing the Perfect Blog Post!” with stop words removed and a 5-word cap becomes:

10-tips-writing-perfect-blog

Without those options it would be 10-tips-for-writing-the-perfect-blog-post.

When to remove stop words — and when not to

Removing stop words like the, a, of, in, and for produces a terser slug and is generally the right call for evergreen content where SEO keywords matter. For example:

  • “The Best Cafés in Paris” → best-cafes-paris (cleaner)
  • “How to Write a Cover Letter” → how-write-cover-letter (still clear)

However, keep stop words when they change meaning or are part of a proper phrase:

  • “Sign In” → do not drop “In” or you get just sign
  • “All or Nothing” → dropping words produces nothing, losing intent

The tool never empties the slug: if removing stop words would erase every word, it falls back to the full word list.

Hyphens vs underscores

Hyphens are almost always the right choice for web URLs. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator (so cold-brew-coffee is read as three distinct words), whereas an underscore joins them into one token. A slug like cold_brew_coffee may be treated as the single term cold_brew_coffee by some crawlers, which loses the individual keyword signal. Use underscores only if your platform or framework requires them by convention.

Character encoding note

Accented characters are folded to their closest plain ASCII equivalent before the slug is built — for example café becomes cafe and Ñoño becomes nono. This keeps the slug pure ASCII and avoids percent-encoding in the URL bar, which improves readability and copy-paste reliability.

How this compares to CMS auto-slugging

Most CMSs — WordPress, Ghost, Contentful — generate slugs automatically when you save a post, but their defaults vary in ways that matter for SEO:

  • WordPress keeps stop words by default and has no word cap, producing slugs like 10-tips-for-writing-the-perfect-blog-post that are longer than necessary.
  • Ghost similarly keeps all words, though the admin UI lets you edit the slug before publishing.
  • Contentful and Sanity auto-slugify the title field but give developers control through field validation rules.

This tool gives you a clean preview before you commit the slug in your CMS — especially useful if you are batch-writing posts and want consistent slug style across all of them, or if you are migrating content and need to match an existing URL pattern.

Everything runs in your browser — your titles never leave your device.