Text to Slug
Turn any text into a clean, URL-friendly slug.
your-slug-will-appear-here
This converts any title or phrase into a clean URL slug — lowercase, hyphen-separated, with accents normalised and punctuation removed — entirely in your browser. A slug is the human-readable part of a URL, and getting it right matters because URLs are effectively permanent: changing one later means either breaking every existing link to the page or maintaining a redirect indefinitely. Accents are normalised through Unicode NFD decomposition, so café becomes cafe and Müller becomes muller rather than percent-encoded gibberish. Hyphens are the correct separator: search engines treat them as word boundaries while underscores join words together. Keep slugs short and specific — three to five meaningful words beats a full sentence, and dropping filler words like "the" and "of" costs nothing. Numbers and dates are safe, but avoid anything that will date the URL if the content is meant to be updated in place.
About the Text to Slug
Convert any title, sentence, or phrase into a clean URL slug — lowercase, hyphen-separated, and safely stripped of accents and special characters. Perfect for blog posts, product pages, and SEO-friendly URLs.
How to use the Text to Slug
- 01Paste or type your text into the input box.
- 02Watch the slug update live as you type.
- 03Adjust the separator if you prefer underscores instead of hyphens.
- 04Click "Copy" to grab the slug, ready to paste into your CMS.
Why use our Text to Slug
- 01
Live conversion
The slug updates instantly as you type — no buttons to press.
- 02
Accent-safe
Accented characters are normalized (é → e, ñ → n) for clean ASCII URLs.
- 03
Symbol-free
Punctuation and special characters are stripped so URLs stay valid and tidy.
- 04
Hyphens or underscores
Switch the separator with one toggle to match your platform's convention.
What makes a good slug
A good slug is short, descriptive and stable. Short because URLs get truncated in search results, shared in messages and read aloud; three to six words is a reasonable target and anything past about sixty characters is doing no work. Descriptive because both people and search engines use the URL as a signal of what the page contains, and because a readable URL is more likely to be clicked when shared. Stable because the cost of change is high. The usual advice is to strip stop words — the, a, of, and — since they add length without adding meaning, though not so aggressively that the result becomes cryptic. Dates are worth avoiding in slugs for evergreen content: a URL containing 2026 looks stale in 2027 even if the article has been updated, and removing it later means a redirect. Keywords belong in the slug only where they are genuinely what the page is about; stuffing them produces long URLs that look like spam.
Hyphens, underscores and accented characters
Hyphens are the correct separator and this is not a matter of taste. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word boundary and an underscore as a word joiner, which means text_to_slug is read as a single token while text-to-slug is read as three words. That difference affects how the URL is understood. Underscores are only appropriate where a platform specifically requires them. Accented and non-ASCII characters are a subtler issue. URLs technically support Unicode via percent-encoding, so a slug containing é is valid — but it becomes %C3%A9 when encoded, which is ugly in a shared link, fragile when copied through systems that handle encoding inconsistently, and awkward to type. Normalising é to e, ñ to n and ü to u produces a slug that survives every context. The trade-off is worth knowing: for a site whose audience reads a non-Latin script, transliterating everything to ASCII can produce meaningless URLs, and keeping native characters may be the better choice.
Changing a slug after publication
Once a URL has been published, other people link to it, search engines index it, and it appears in bookmarks and message histories. Changing it breaks all of that unless you put a redirect in place. If you must change a slug, issue a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one: that tells search engines the page has moved definitively and passes the accumulated ranking signals across, and it keeps every existing link working. A 302 temporary redirect does not pass those signals reliably and should not be used for a permanent move. Keep the redirect in place indefinitely rather than for a token period, because links on other people's sites do not get updated. The broader lesson is to decide the slug carefully at publication and then leave it alone — fixing a typo is worth a redirect, tightening the wording usually is not.
Slug patterns worth copying and avoiding
| Title | Weak slug | Better slug |
|---|---|---|
| How to Merge PDF Files in 2026 | how-to-merge-pdf-files-in-2026 | merge-pdf-files |
| The Ultimate Guide to Café Culture | the-ultimate-guide-to-caf%C3%A9-culture | cafe-culture-guide |
| 10 Tips & Tricks for Better Sleep! | 10-tips-&-tricks-for-better-sleep! | better-sleep-tips |
| Product Update — Version 2.0 Released | product_update_version_2.0_released | product-update-2-0 |
Hyphens are read as word boundaries by search engines; underscores are read as joiners.
Frequently asked questions
What is a URL slug?
The readable part of a URL that identifies the page — 'text-to-slug-converter' in /blog/text-to-slug-converter. Good slugs are short, lowercase and hyphen-separated.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so text_to_slug reads as one token while text-to-slug reads as three words.
Why are accents removed?
Accented characters become percent-encoded in URLs — é turns into %C3%A9 — which is ugly when shared and fragile across systems that handle encoding inconsistently.
How long should a slug be?
Three to six words is a good target. Past about sixty characters the extra length adds nothing and gets truncated in search results anyway.
Should I include the year?
Not for evergreen content. A URL containing 2026 looks stale the following year, and removing it later requires a permanent redirect.
Can I change a slug after publishing?
You can, but set up a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL. Without one you break every existing link and lose the page's accumulated ranking signals.
What about stop words like 'the' and 'of'?
Usually worth removing, since they add length without meaning. Keep them where dropping them makes the slug cryptic or changes the sense.
What if my site is in a non-Latin script?
Transliterating everything to ASCII can produce meaningless URLs for your readers. Keeping native characters may be the better choice despite the encoding awkwardness.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Conversion happens entirely in your browser and nothing leaves your device.
Last updated
URL syntax follows RFC 3986. Redirect semantics follow RFC 9110, which defines 301 as a permanent and 302 as a temporary redirect.