URL Slug Generator
Create SEO-friendly URL slugs instantly. Convert any text into clean, readable URLs with automatic formatting, transliteration, and optimization. Perfect for bloggers, developers, and SEO professionals.
"10 Best SEO Tips for 2024"
→ 10-best-seo-tips-for-2024
"Women's Premium Leather Handbag"
→ womens-premium-leather-handbag
"Café & Restaurant à Paris"
→ cafe-restaurant-a-paris
"User Profile Settings Page"
→ userProfileSettingsPage
"The Ultimate Guide to Web Design"
→ ultimate-guide-web-design
"Database Table Name Example"
→ database_table_name_example
Create Perfect SEO-Friendly URL Slugs
URL slugs are the foundation of good SEO and user experience. A well-crafted slug helps search engines understand your content, makes URLs shareable and memorable, and improves click-through rates in search results. Our URL Slug Generator takes any text—from blog post titles to product names—and transforms it into clean, optimized, search engine-friendly URLs in seconds.
Whether you're managing a blog, building an e-commerce site, or developing web applications, creating consistent, SEO-optimized slugs is crucial. Our tool handles everything automatically: converting to lowercase, replacing spaces with hyphens, removing special characters, transliterating foreign characters, and even eliminating duplicate words. Get professional-quality URL slugs without the manual work.
How to Generate URL Slugs
Enter Your Text
Type or paste the text you want to convert into a URL slug. This can be a blog post title, product name, category name, or any text. The tool accepts text in any language and automatically handles special characters and accents.
Choose Your Options
Select your preferred slug format (lowercase, uppercase, camelCase), separator style (hyphens or underscores), and whether to remove stop words or duplicate words. Set a maximum length if needed to keep slugs concise.
Preview and Generate
See a real-time preview of your generated slug as you type. The tool automatically formats your text according to SEO best practices, removing problematic characters and optimizing for search engines.
Copy and Use
Click the copy button to add the slug to your clipboard instantly. Paste it directly into your CMS, web application, or wherever you need a clean, SEO-friendly URL. Generate multiple slugs in batch mode for efficiency.
Advanced Features for Perfect URLs
Auto Transliteration
Automatically converts accented and foreign characters to ASCII equivalents. "Café" becomes "cafe", "über" becomes "uber" for universal compatibility.
Multiple Formats
Choose from lowercase, uppercase, camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, and more. Perfect for different platforms and coding conventions.
Custom Separators
Use hyphens (-), underscores (_), or custom separators. Hyphens are recommended for SEO, but we support all common options.
Remove Duplicates
Automatically detects and removes duplicate words from slugs. "Best Best SEO Tips" becomes "best-seo-tips" automatically.
Length Control
Set maximum slug length to ensure URLs stay concise. Automatically truncates at word boundaries for clean results.
Batch Processing
Generate multiple slugs at once from a list. Perfect for migrating content, bulk imports, or processing large datasets.
URL Slug Best Practices for SEO
| Practice | Good Example | Bad Example | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use Hyphens | best-seo-tips | best_seo_tips | Google treats hyphens as word separators |
| Keep It Short | wordpress-seo-guide | complete-guide-to-wordpress-seo-optimization | Shorter URLs rank better and are easier to share |
| Use Lowercase | seo-tools | SEO-Tools | Prevents duplicate content issues |
| Include Keywords | beginner-seo-tips | article-123 | Helps search engines understand content |
| Remove Stop Words | best-coffee-makers | the-best-coffee-makers-for-home | Keeps URLs concise without losing meaning |
| Avoid Special Chars | seo-tips-2024 | seo-tips-&-tricks! | Prevents encoding issues and confusion |
Professional Use Cases
Content Management
- Generate slugs for blog posts and articles
- Create consistent URL structures
- Optimize permalinks for WordPress/Joomla/Drupal
- Maintain clean URL architecture
- Bulk generate slugs for content migration
E-Commerce Sites
- Create product page URLs from product names
- Generate category and subcategory slugs
- Optimize URLs for product variations
- Handle multilingual product names
- Ensure URL consistency across catalogs
Web Development
- Generate route names for web applications
- Create API endpoint identifiers
- Format database-friendly identifiers
- Handle user-generated content URLs
- Implement URL rewriting systems
SEO & Marketing
- Optimize URLs for target keywords
- Create shareable campaign URLs
- Generate landing page URLs
- Standardize URL formats across sites
- Audit and improve existing URL structures
Common URL Slug Mistakes to Avoid
- Using Spaces Instead of Hyphens: URLs with spaces become encoded as "%20", making them ugly and hard to read. Always replace spaces with hyphens. "my page" becomes "my%20page" in browsers, but "my-page" stays clean and readable.
- Including Dates When Unnecessary: Adding dates to slugs (like "/2024/01/article-name") makes content seem outdated and limits evergreen value. Only include dates for time-sensitive content like news articles or event announcements.
- Using Numbers or IDs: Slugs like "post-12345" or "product-id-789" provide no context to users or search engines. Use descriptive words that indicate what the page is about instead.
- Making Slugs Too Long: Long slugs like "the-ultimate-complete-comprehensive-guide-to-seo-optimization-for-beginners" are hard to share and remember. Aim for 3-5 words maximum while keeping the meaning clear.
- Changing URLs After Publishing: Modifying a slug after a page is live breaks existing links and loses SEO value unless you implement proper 301 redirects. Get it right the first time to avoid these issues.
- Using Special Characters: Characters like &, %, $, @, and ! cause encoding problems and make URLs messy. Stick to letters, numbers, and hyphens for maximum compatibility.
- Ignoring Transliteration: Non-ASCII characters like "ñ", "é", or "ü" can cause encoding issues. Convert them to ASCII equivalents ("n", "e", "u") for universal compatibility.
- Keyword Stuffing: Cramming multiple keywords into a slug like "seo-tips-tricks-hacks-secrets-guide" looks spammy and doesn't improve rankings. Use natural, descriptive language instead.
Prioritize Keywords at the Start
Place your most important keywords at the beginning of the slug. "seo-tips-beginners" is better than "beginners-guide-seo-tips" because search engines give more weight to words that appear earlier in the URL.
Remove Stop Words Wisely
Words like "a", "the", "and", "or", "but" can usually be removed without losing meaning. "best-coffee-makers" works better than "the-best-coffee-makers". However, keep stop words when they're essential for clarity.
Match Slug to Page Title
Your slug should closely reflect your page title and H1 heading. This consistency helps search engines understand your content and improves user trust when they see the URL in search results.
Use Evergreen Slugs
Avoid time-specific references unless necessary. "email-marketing-tips" has longer value than "email-marketing-tips-2024". Update content regularly but keep the slug timeless to maintain SEO equity over years.
Keep Directory Structure Simple
Shorter URL paths are better: "site.com/blog/seo-tips" beats "site.com/blog/category/digital-marketing/seo/tips". Each directory level dilutes link equity and makes URLs harder to remember.
Be Consistent Across Your Site
Establish URL formatting rules and stick to them. If you use hyphens in one section, use them everywhere. Consistency makes your site more professional and easier for users to navigate.
How URL Slugs Impact Technical SEO
URL structure is a confirmed Google ranking factor and plays a crucial role in technical SEO. While not the most powerful ranking signal, well-optimized URLs contribute to better crawlability, indexability, and user experience—all of which indirectly boost rankings.
Crawl Efficiency: Clean, logical URL structures help search engine bots crawl your site more efficiently. When URLs are predictable and hierarchical, crawlers can better understand site architecture and discover new content faster. This is especially important for large sites with thousands of pages.
Keyword Signals: Including relevant keywords in URLs provides context to search engines about page content. While not as powerful as title tags or content, URL keywords still send ranking signals. Google's John Mueller has confirmed that keywords in URLs have "a slight, slight, slight weight" as a ranking factor.
Click-Through Rates: URLs appear in search results, and clean, descriptive slugs improve CTR. Users are more likely to click "example.com/best-coffee-makers" than "example.com/?p=12345". Higher CTR is a user experience signal that can positively impact rankings.
Link Building: Clean URLs are more likely to be linked to naturally. When other sites reference your content, they often use the URL as anchor text. "See example.com/seo-guide" is better than "See example.com/article?id=789&cat=seo" for both users and SEO.
Social Sharing: Short, readable URLs perform better on social media. Twitter's character limits, link previews on Facebook, and general shareability all favor concise, clear URLs. More shares lead to more traffic and potentially more backlinks.
Platform-Specific URL Guidelines
| Platform | Default Behavior | Recommended Format | Key Considerations |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | /?p=123 (plain) | /post-name/ | Set permalinks to "Post name" for clean URLs |
| Shopify | /products/product-name | Keep default, optimize slug | Auto-generates from product title, edit manually |
| Wix | /page-name | Customize in page settings | Limited control, focus on slug quality |
| Joomla | /component/article/123 | /category/article-alias | Enable SEF URLs and URL rewriting |
| Drupal | /node/123 | /content-type/title | Use Pathauto module for automatic slugs |
| Medium | /@username/title-hash | Auto-generated from title | Cannot customize, optimize title instead |
Handling Multilingual and Special Characters
Creating URL-safe slugs from non-English text requires special handling. Our tool automatically transliterates common accented characters and provides options for handling scripts like Cyrillic, Arabic, and Chinese.
Common Transliteration Examples
- French: "Café à Paris" → "cafe-a-paris"
- German: "Über uns" → "ueber-uns"
- Spanish: "Año Nuevo" → "ano-nuevo"
- Portuguese: "São Paulo" → "sao-paulo"
- Scandinavian: "Kjøpe nå" → "kjope-naa"
- Turkish: "İstanbul" → "istanbul"
- Polish: "Zł oty" → "zloty"
- Czech: "Češ tina" → "cestina"
For non-Latin scripts (Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean), we recommend using English translations or romanizations in URLs for maximum compatibility and global accessibility. While modern browsers support Unicode URLs, ASCII slugs remain the safest choice for international SEO.