What makes a good URL slug?

Short, readable, and containing the words someone would search for. Three to five words is usually right. Drop filler words like “the” and “and” unless removing them makes the slug ambiguous, and never include a date you might want to change later.

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so “image_resizer” can be read as one token while “image-resizer” is read as two words. Every major CMS defaults to hyphens for this reason.

How are accented and non-Latin characters handled?

Accented Latin characters are folded to their closest ASCII equivalent — é to e, ü to u. Non-Latin scripts have no meaningful ASCII equivalent and are dropped, so a fully Cyrillic or CJK title needs a transliterated slug written by hand.

Slug Generator

Type a title and get a clean URL slug: lowercase, spaces to hyphens, accents folded to ASCII, and punctuation removed. “Café Owner’s Guide to SEO (2026)” becomes “cafe-owners-guide-to-seo-2026”. Runs in your browser, ready to copy into a CMS.

Runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded

Questions

What makes a good URL slug?: Short, readable, and containing the words someone would search for. Three to five words is usually right. Drop filler words like “the” and “and” unless removing them makes the slug ambiguous, and never include a date you might want to change later.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?: Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so “image_resizer” can be read as one token while “image-resizer” is read as two words. Every major CMS defaults to hyphens for this reason.
How are accented and non-Latin characters handled?: Accented Latin characters are folded to their closest ASCII equivalent — é to e, ü to u. Non-Latin scripts have no meaningful ASCII equivalent and are dropped, so a fully Cyrillic or CJK title needs a transliterated slug written by hand.

Slug Generator

Questions

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