Slug Generator

What is a slug generator and what does it do?

A slug generator turns a page title into the short, lowercase, ASCII only phrase that forms the last part of a URL. In yoursite.com/best-running-shoes-flat-feet, the bold part is the slug. This tool converts your title letter by letter, removes apostrophes and punctuation, and joins the words with hyphens. If you want, it also drops filler words.

I mostly use it for two jobs: converting a full editorial calendar into URLs in one go, and matching old and new addresses during a site migration. Typing slugs by hand works for one page; across fifty pages, however, a missing hyphen or a stray capital slips through. In short, the slug is a small but very visible item on any technical SEO checklist.

• Bulk mode: every line becomes its own slug.
• Three character languages: Türkçe, English and Deutsch apply different letter rules.
• Checks: each row shows its character and word count, with duplicate and long labels where needed.
• Privacy: your titles never leave the browser.

What makes a good URL slug?

Google's URL structure guide is clear on three points: use readable words, separate them with hyphens rather than underscores, and avoid long ID numbers. On top of that, these are the rules I apply in client projects:

• Keep it short: three to five meaningful words cover most pages. In other words, the slug does not need to repeat the whole title.
• Describe the topic: someone reading the slug should be able to guess what the page offers.
• Stay lowercase: Google treats URLs as case sensitive, so /Shoes and /shoes count as two different addresses.
• Leave the year out: a guide you refresh every year looks stale with an old year in its URL.
• Avoid repetition: writing the same word twice adds nothing to the address.

Once you have the slug, judge it together with the page title and description rather than on its own. When all three describe the same topic, searchers therefore know what they will find before they click. That is why I do the final check in the Google SERP preview tool and draft the title and description with the meta tag generator.

What happens to accented letters like é, ñ or ü in a URL?

In the address bar, a URL such as /café-menü looks fine. Paste the same link into an email or a chat, however, and it often turns into /caf%C3%A9-men%C3%BC. The reason is technical: URLs travel as a limited set of ASCII characters, so letters like é and ü first become UTF-8 bytes and then percent encoded sequences.

That said, Google does not treat this as a problem. Its URL structure guide says you can use words in your audience's language and, where it fits, transliterated words. So an accented URL will not get you penalised. Still, I prefer the ASCII version for three reasons:

• Readability: a string of %C3%A9 in a shared link does not inspire trust.
• Typing: someone without that letter on their keyboard cannot type the address by hand.
• Consistency: the Turkish dotted İ and dotless ı change case unexpectedly in some software, which can produce inconsistent addresses.

That is why the English mode strips accents (é → e, ñ → n) and the Türkçe mode turns ç, ş, ğ and ı into c, s, g and i. Characters outside the Latin alphabet, for example Arabic script or emoji, disappear entirely; for such titles, check the slug by hand.

Why does the slug generator turn German umlauts into ae, oe and ue?

In German, the established written substitutes for ä, ö and ü are ae, oe and ue, and ß becomes ss. A German reader therefore finds groessentabelle more natural than grossentabelle. WordPress follows the same rule in its remove_accents function: with a German site language it writes ae, oe and ue, while other languages simply lose the dots and keep a, o and u.

In practice, the slug generator handles this with the character language buttons. One title gives two results:

• English mode: Zürich Travel Guide becomes zurich-travel-guide.
• Deutsch mode: the same title becomes zuerich-travel-guide.

Which one is right, then, depends on the page. On an English travel blog, zurich matches what your readers type; on a German site, zuerich follows the local convention. The rule of thumb: choose the language of the page, and for mixed titles go with the language of the most important word. On a multilingual site, generate each language's slug separately, then connect the versions with the tags from the hreflang generator.

Which stop words does the tool remove, and which does it keep on purpose?

A stop word links a sentence together but says nothing about the topic on its own. When you tick the box, the tool applies the list for the selected language and shows the removed words under the box:

• English: the, a, an, and, or, of, to, in, for, on, at, is, with, by.
• Türkçe: ve, ile, için, bir, bu, da, de, ki, mi, ya, veya, ama.
• Deutsch: der, die, das, und, oder, ein, eine, für, mit, von, im, in, auf, zu, den, dem.

Question words such as how, what and why stay out of the list on purpose, because they carry the search intent. Even so, the English list can surprise you: What Is a Slug becomes what-slug, since is and a both go. If you want what-is-a-slug, leave the box unticked. When a title consists only of stop words, the tool keeps them all, because an empty slug is useless.

Before you tick the box, ask one question: does the removed word change the meaning? In Cats and Dogs Food, and can go. A book title like Of Mice and Men, on the other hand, needs every word; keep the box off there.

Changing a live slug: your redirect plan

Change the slug of a live page and the old address returns a 404; links and search traffic pointing to it go nowhere. Google recommends a permanent server side redirect for this case, meaning a 301 or 308 status code. According to its redirects documentation, a permanent redirect signals that the target should become the canonical URL.

1. Build a mapping sheet: old URL in one column, new URL in the next. For bulk jobs, I generate the new slugs with this tool first and then paste them in.
2. Redirect one to one: send each old URL to the closest new page. Never dump everything on the home page.
3. Check for chains: after launch, confirm with the redirect checker that each old URL reaches its target in a single hop.
4. Update internal links and the sitemap: add the new URLs with the XML sitemap generator.
5. Keep redirects in place: Google's site move guide advises keeping them as long as possible, generally at least one year.

For a relaunch that changes many URLs at once, my website migration SEO checklist walks through the full process.

What should you check when generating slugs in bulk?

When you convert every product in a category or a full year of blog titles in one pass, errors hide in the rows you never read. These are the four things I check on bulk runs:

• Duplicate slugs: if two titles produce the same slug, the tool marks the second row as a duplicate. WordPress resolves such a clash by adding a suffix like -2, which leaves a meaningless number in the URL. Add a distinguishing word to one of the titles instead.
• Length: a slug over 60 characters gets an amber length label. Google sets no such limit; instead, it is my readability threshold. On amber rows, shorten the slug rather than the title.
• Folder structure: the slug is only the last part of the URL. Decide on folders such as /blog/ or /products/ once for the whole site; my guide to category structure for large websites covers this in depth.
• Row matching: Copy all returns the slugs in the same order as the titles. A line made only of emoji or punctuation produces no slug and drops out of the list, so check the order when you paste into a sheet.

If you are planning a structural change across hundreds of URLs, the slugs are the easy part. Redirects and internal links carry the real risk. In projects like that, we build the URL architecture together as part of our SEO consulting work.