Slug Generator
Turn a headline into a tidy, lowercase, hyphenated URL slug with accents folded down.
Processed on your device — no upload
Accents are folded to their base letters, so Café Résumé becomes cafe-resume. Truncation never cuts a word in half.
How to use it
- Paste one or more titles, one per line.
- Adjust the separator and maximum length if you need to.
- Copy the slugs.
How it works
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL. Making one means solving three problems: characters that are not safe in a URL, characters that are safe but ugly, and length.
Accents are folded rather than stripped. The text is normalised into its decomposed form, which separates é into e plus a combining accent, and then the combining marks are removed. So Café becomes cafe — not caf, which is what naive stripping produces, and not caf%C3%A9, which is what percent-encoding produces.
Everything that is not a letter or a digit becomes the separator, runs of separators collapse to one, and leading and trailing separators are trimmed. Hyphens are the right separator for URLs: search engines treat a hyphen as a word boundary and an underscore as a joining character, so my_article reads as one token where my-article reads as two.
Length trimming cuts at a separator rather than mid-word, so a truncated slug never ends in a fragment. Around 60 characters is a sensible ceiling — long enough to be descriptive, short enough to survive being displayed in a search result.
A worked example
You are publishing an article titled:
How to Merge PDF Files — Without Uploading Them (2026 Guide)Paste it. With the defaults you get how-to-merge-pdf-files-without-uploading-them-2026. The em dash, the parentheses and the extra spaces all became separators, the run of them collapsed to a single hyphen, and the 60-character limit trimmed at a word boundary — dropping guide rather than leaving gui.
Now the accent case. Paste Café Culture in Amman: A Résumé and you get cafe-culture-in-amman-a-resume. Both accented words survived as readable words. Percent-encoded accents in a URL are technically valid and horrible to read, share or type.
Non-Latin scripts are kept rather than stripped. Paste مرحبا بالعالم and you get مرحبا-بالعالم — a valid URL that browsers display as written and percent-encode behind the scenes. Only use a transliterated Latin slug if the address has to survive being pasted into older software.
The tool takes one title per line, so you can paste a whole content calendar of thirty headlines and copy thirty slugs back in one go.
One editorial point the tool cannot make for you: a slug should not simply be the title. A headline like “Everything You Need to Know About PDF Compression in 2026” makes a better slug as pdf-compression-guide — shorter, keyword-focused, and it does not go stale in January. Shorten the title before pasting when the slug is going to outlive the headline.
If you only need a different capitalisation rather than a URL, the case converter is the simpler tool.
Questions
How do I make an SEO-friendly permalink?
A slug is the readable part of a URL: lowercase, words joined by hyphens, no punctuation. This produces the kebab-case form a friendly url needs, with accents folded to plain letters.
What is a URL slug?
The readable part of a web address that identifies the page — the "how-to-merge-pdf" in example.com/blog/how-to-merge-pdf. It is what makes a link intelligible before anyone clicks it.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joining character, so my_article reads as one word while my-article reads as two.
How does it handle accented characters?
They are folded to their base letters, so Café becomes cafe. That keeps the word readable, unlike stripping the character entirely or percent-encoding it.
What about Arabic, Chinese or other non-Latin scripts?
They are kept. Any Unicode letter is treated as a letter, so an Arabic title produces an Arabic slug with the punctuation stripped. Browsers display these correctly and percent-encode them behind the scenes. Use a transliterated Latin slug instead if the URL has to survive being pasted into older software.
How long should a slug be?
Around 60 characters or shorter. Long enough to describe the page, short enough to display fully in a search result and to be shared without wrapping.
Will it cut a word in half when trimming?
No. Truncation always falls back to the last separator, so a shortened slug ends on a whole word.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The conversion runs in your browser, so unpublished headlines and content plans stay on your device.
Can I convert a whole list at once?
Yes. Each line is converted independently, so you can paste a content calendar and copy all the slugs back together.
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