URL Slug Generator

How to turn a title into a slug

1. Paste or type your headline in the title field. The slug appears below it instantly and updates on every keystroke.
2. Optionally tick "Remove stop words" to drop filler like the, a, and of.
3. Pick your separator: hyphen is the default and the right answer for URLs, underscore is there for filenames and systems that want it.
4. Click Copy slug and paste it into your CMS.

A worked example

Take the placeholder title on this page: 10 Things I Wish I'd Known About Café Ownership. The default output is 10-things-i-wish-id-known-about-cafe-ownership. Notice three things happened at once: the accented é in Café was transliterated to a plain e, the apostrophe in I'd was removed rather than replaced with a hyphen (so you get "id", not "i-d"), and everything went lowercase with single hyphens between words. Tick the stop words box and the slug tightens to 10-things-wish-id-known-cafe-ownership, dropping "i" and "about". That is the version I would ship: it keeps every meaningful word and loses only glue.

How the cleaning works

The title is first run through Unicode normalization, which splits accented characters into a base letter plus a combining mark, and the marks are then stripped. That one step handles é, ñ, ü, and most European diacritics without a lookup table. Smart quotes and straight apostrophes are deleted outright, then anything that is not a lowercase letter or digit becomes a word boundary. The stop word list holds 34 common English filler words, and there is a small safeguard worth knowing about: if removing stop words would delete your entire title (say the title is "What Is It About You"), the tool keeps the original words rather than handing you an empty slug.

Honest limitations

Transliteration covers accents, not alphabets. Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and CJK characters are simply dropped, so a fully non-Latin title produces an empty slug; you will need a language-specific transliterator for those. The stop word list is English only, meaning French "le" and Spanish "el" survive the filter. There is no length cap, so a 25 word headline gives you a 25 word slug, and you should shorten it by hand: in practice a slug of four to six meaningful words is the sweet spot, long enough to describe the page, short enough that the URL does not wrap in a shared link. And the tool never checks whether the slug is already taken on your site, since that answer only your CMS knows.