Slugify — URL Slug Generator
Turn any text, title or heading into a clean, SEO-friendly URL slug. Accented letters are transliterated to ASCII (café → cafe), everything is lowercased, and spaces and punctuation collapse into a single hyphen or underscore. Paste one string or a whole list — one line in, one slug out. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Runs locally — slugs are generated entirely in your browser with standard JavaScript string functions. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or sent to a server, so it is safe for internal titles and unpublished headlines.
What this tool is
- A free, in-browser URL slug generator: paste any text, title or heading and get back a clean, lowercase, hyphen-separated slug ready to drop into a URL or permalink.
- Accented and non-ASCII Latin letters are transliterated to plain ASCII (café → cafe, Zürich → zurich) using Unicode NFKD normalization, so the slug stays portable.
- Spaces and punctuation become a single separator of your choice (- or _), repeats are collapsed, and leading/trailing separators are trimmed.
- Optional toggles: lowercasing, accent-stripping, a maximum length (cut on a clean separator boundary), and removal of common English stop words (the, a, of, and…).
- Paste one string or a whole list — one line in, one slug out — and everything runs client-side. Nothing you type is ever sent to a server.
What is a URL slug?
A slug is the readable part of a URL that names a specific page — usually the last segment of the path. In playciso.com/tools/slugify the slug is slugify. Slugifying is the process of turning an arbitrary title like "What Is a URL Slug?!" into a clean, URL-safe form such as what-is-a-url-slug.
Why slugs matter
- Readable & shareable. A descriptive slug tells people and search engines what a page is about before they open it — easier to scan in search results, chat and email than an encoded, numeric or random URL.
- SEO-friendly. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators, so a slug of real words is parsed as those words. Short, lowercase, hyphenated slugs follow long-standing URL-structure best practice.
- No broken-looking links. Raw spaces become
%20and accented letters turn into long%-sequences; a slug avoids all of that.
How this tool builds a slug
- Transliterate accents. Text is normalized with Unicode
NFKD, which splits accented letters into a base letter plus a combining mark; the marks are then stripped, socafé→cafeandZürich→zurich. Letters that don’t decompose (ß, æ, ø, ł, đ, þ…) are mapped to ASCII equivalents. - Lowercase. Casing is normalized so the same title always yields the same slug and links stay case-insensitive.
- Replace spaces & punctuation. Every run of characters that isn’t a letter or digit becomes a single separator — your choice of
-or_. - Collapse & trim. Repeated separators collapse to one (
a---b → a-b) and any leading or trailing separator is removed. An optional max length cuts on a clean boundary.
Privacy note: Every step — normalization, transliteration, separator replacement and trimming — runs in your browser with plain JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded or logged, so it is safe to slugify internal titles or unpublished headlines you would rather not send to a third-party service.
Frequently asked questions
What is a URL slug?
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page, usually the last segment of the path. In https://playciso.com/blog/what-is-a-url-slug the slug is what-is-a-url-slug. A good slug is lowercase, uses hyphens between words, contains only unreserved URL characters (letters, digits and hyphens), and describes the page in a few meaningful words. Slugifying is the process of turning an arbitrary title like "What Is a URL Slug?!" into that clean form.
Why do slugs matter for SEO and usability?
A descriptive slug tells both people and search engines what a page is about before they open it, which can improve click-through from search results and makes links easier to read, share and remember. Clean slugs avoid encoded gibberish (spaces become %20, accented characters become long %-sequences) that looks broken when pasted into chat or email. Keeping slugs short, lowercase and hyphen-separated is a long-standing best practice echoed by Google’s own URL-structure guidance — hyphens are treated as word separators, underscores are not.
How are accented and non-English characters handled?
This tool normalizes text with Unicode NFKD, which splits an accented character such as é into a base letter e plus a separate combining accent mark, then removes the combining marks. The result is that café becomes cafe, Zürich becomes zurich and naïve becomes naive, without you maintaining a lookup table. A few letters that do not decompose that way — ß, æ, ø, ł, đ, þ and similar — are mapped to sensible ASCII equivalents (ss, ae, o, l, d, th). Characters from scripts that have no Latin transliteration are dropped rather than guessed at. Turn the "strip accents" toggle off if you want to keep Unicode letters in the slug instead.
What is the difference between a hyphen and an underscore separator?
Both produce a readable slug, but search engines treat them differently: a hyphen (-) is interpreted as a word boundary, so url-slug-generator is read as three words, while an underscore (_) is treated as a word-joining character, so url_slug_generator can be read as one token. For public, SEO-facing URLs the hyphen is the conventional and recommended choice. Underscores are more common in code identifiers, file names and database columns, which is why both are offered here.
Is anything I paste sent to a server?
No. All slugifying — normalization, transliteration, separator replacement, trimming and stop-word removal — runs entirely in your browser using standard JavaScript string functions. There is no network request, no logging and no upload, so it is safe to slugify internal titles, unpublished headlines or anything else you would rather not send to a third party.