What does the slug generator do?

It strips punctuation, folds accented characters to plain ASCII, collapses whitespace and joins words with a hyphen (or underscore) to produce a clean, URL-safe slug.

Can I keep non-Latin characters?

Yes. Turn off ASCII only to keep Unicode letters and numbers in the slug; turn it on to fold everything down to plain ASCII for maximum compatibility.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The slug is generated entirely in your browser — your titles and text never leave your device.

Why use hyphens instead of underscores in a URL?

Google treats hyphens as word separators but underscores as joiners, so "best-coffee" reads as two words while "best_coffee" reads as one. Hyphens are the recommended choice for SEO-friendly URLs; underscores are offered for filenames and code where they are conventional.

What happens to accented and non-Latin characters?

Accented Latin letters are folded to their base ASCII form (café becomes cafe) using Unicode normalisation. With "ASCII only" off, other Unicode letters and digits are kept so you can build slugs in non-Latin scripts.

How long should a URL slug be?

There is no hard limit, but short and descriptive wins — roughly 3 to 6 words. Trim filler words like "the" and "a" from the title before slugifying for the cleanest, most readable URL.

Does it remove duplicate and trailing separators?

Yes. Runs of spaces, hyphens or underscores collapse to a single separator, and leading or trailing separators are trimmed, so you never get a slug like "--my--post--".

What is the URL Slug Generator?

Free URL slug generator that converts titles and text into clean, lowercase, hyphenated slugs with accent folding and ASCII-only options. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

URL Slug Generator — Gera Tools

Name: URL Slug Generator
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Generate clean, SEO-friendly URL slugs

This tool turns any title or heading into a tidy, URL-safe slug — the lowercase, hyphenated string that appears in a page address (e.g. /best-privacy-tools-2026). It is built for bloggers, CMS users and developers who need a consistent permalink or filename from a human-written title without retyping it.

The transformation pipeline

The text is first Unicode-normalised (NFKD) and stripped of combining accent marks, so é becomes e and ü becomes u. It is lowercased (optional), then punctuation and symbols are removed — with ASCII only on, anything outside A–Z, 0–9 is dropped; with it off, Unicode letters and digits from any script are kept. Finally, every run of spaces, hyphens and underscores is collapsed into your chosen separator, and leading and trailing separators are trimmed.

Transformation examples

Input	Slug
Hello, World!	hello-world
Café & Crème	cafe-creme
My_Draft Post	my-draft-post
2026 Q1 Report	2026-q1-report
Was ist das?	was-ist-das
10 Best Privacy-First Tools (2026 Edition!)	10-best-privacy-first-tools-2026-edition

Why slug format matters for SEO

Search engines read hyphens as word separators. A URL like /best-coffee-shops-london tells Google there are four distinct words in the slug. Underscores, by contrast, are treated as joiners — /best_coffee_shops reads as one token. This means hyphenated slugs produce cleaner keyword signals in URLs.

Short, descriptive slugs also matter for click-through rate. A slug visible in a search result like /how-to-fix-sleep-schedule reads naturally and reinforces what the page is about. A URL like /p?id=29471 does not.

Practical slug hygiene

Keep it short. Aim for 3–6 meaningful words. Trim articles (the, a, an) and filler words (of, for, in) that add length without adding meaning. The title “The Best Guide to Setting Up a Home Office” becomes best-guide-home-office, which is both shorter and more keyword-dense.

Never change a published slug without redirecting. Once a URL is live and indexed, changing its slug breaks all inbound links and loses any page authority it has built. If you must change it, set up a 301 permanent redirect from the old slug to the new one.

Avoid dates in evergreen slugs. A slug like /seo-tips-2024 will read stale in two years. For content you plan to keep updated, use /seo-tips and update the date in the body or meta instead.

Developer use cases

Beyond blog titles, slug generation is useful in several developer contexts:

CMS and headless content pipelines: When ingesting content from editors who write in free-form text, auto-generating a slug from the title prevents inconsistently formatted permalinks. This tool’s output can be used directly as a filename, a database key, or a route parameter.

Filename sanitisation: Exporting files from user-generated titles (report names, document titles, image descriptions) often produces filenames with spaces, accents, and special characters that cause problems on certain file systems or when embedded in URLs. Running each title through the slug generator produces a safe, consistent filename.

i18n route generation: When building multilingual sites, generating slugs in ASCII-only mode ensures that the URL remains readable in browser address bars regardless of the script of the original title. When you want to keep non-Latin characters (Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Devanagari) in the URL for native readability, turn ASCII-only off and Unicode letters are preserved.

API and SDK key naming: Configuration keys, SDK feature flags, and analytics event names often follow a slug-like convention. Pasting a human-readable description and slugifying it gives a consistent, predictable identifier.

Everything runs in your browser, so your titles and content are never uploaded or stored anywhere.

Slug stability: the rule that outranks all formatting rules

Once a URL is published, its slug is a commitment. Changing a slug later — even to a “better” one — breaks every existing link, resets any search equity the page earned, and requires a permanent 301 redirect from the old path. Google’s own URL structure guidance recommends simple, descriptive, hyphen-separated words, but the deeper lesson is to get the slug right before publishing, because the cost of fixing it afterwards is a redirect you must maintain forever. Practical consequence: strip dates and volatile qualifiers (“new”, “2024”, “updated”) out of slugs at creation time so the URL stays truthful as content evolves.

Non-Latin text and international slugs

This tool transliterates or strips characters outside a–z0–9, which is the convention for English-language sites. But URLs can legitimately contain non-ASCII characters: modern browsers display Unicode paths directly, and RFC 3986 defines how they are percent-encoded on the wire. Sites publishing in Arabic, Japanese or Russian routinely keep native-script slugs, which are more readable for their audience than a lossy Latin transliteration. The engineering rule: pick one policy per site — ASCII slugs everywhere, or native-script slugs everywhere — and never mix, because mixed conventions produce duplicate-looking URLs that are hard to normalise later.