Text URL slug generator
Turn titles into clean URL slugs, converting accents properly, stripping filler words and handling a whole list at once.
One per line to convert several at once.
0 keeps every word.
Ready. Runs locally on your device.
Your files stay on your device. The tool works directly in your browser, using your device to process your files. Nothing is sent to our servers, and we never receive, store, or see your files or figures.
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Reembun. (2026, July 28). URL slug generator. https://reembun.com/slug-generator
How to use it
Paste the title
One heading, or one per line to convert a whole list of them at once.
Set separator and length
Choose the separator, and use Maximum words to stop a long heading becoming a long URL. Zero keeps every word.
Strip what adds nothing
Lowercase and Remove filler words take out the parts of a heading that carry no meaning in a URL.
Copy the slugs
Accents are folded and punctuation is dropped, so what you copy is safe to put straight into a path.
What a slug needs to do
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL. A good one is lowercase, uses hyphens between words, contains only unreserved URL characters, describes the page, and is short enough to read at a glance.
Title: How to Compress a PDF Without Losing Quality
Slug: how-to-compress-a-pdf-without-losing-quality
Short: compress-pdf-without-losing-qualityAccents are transliterated, not deleted
This is where naive slug generators fail. Stripping everything outside [a-z0-9] turns “café” into “caf” and “Łódź” into “d”, losing the word entirely.
The correct approach is Unicode NFD normalisation, which decomposes an accented character into its base letter plus a combining mark, followed by removing the marks:
| Input | Naive strip | Correct |
|---|---|---|
| café | caf | cafe |
| Zürich | z-rich | zurich |
| São Paulo | s-o-paulo | sao-paulo |
| Đà Nẵng | -n-ng | da-nang |
| Kraków | krak-w | krakow |
A handful of letters have no decomposed form and need explicit mapping: ß to ss, æ to ae, ø to o, ł to l, đ to d, œ to oe. Ampersands become “and”, since dropping them can change the meaning.
Hyphens versus underscores
Google’s guidance has been consistent: hyphens separate words, underscores join them.
pdf-merge-tool → read as "pdf", "merge", "tool"
pdf_merge_tool → may be read as one tokenThe practical effect on ranking is small but the effect on readability is not, and hyphens are the near-universal convention across CMSes, static site generators and frameworks.
Filler words
Removing articles, conjunctions and short prepositions shortens a slug without losing meaning:
Before: the-best-way-to-compress-a-pdf-for-email
After: best-way-compress-pdf-emailWhether to do this is a judgement call. Shorter is usually better, but removing too much can make a slug read as keyword stuffing, and it can occasionally change meaning, since “a” and “the” are not always noise. This tool keeps the first word regardless, since dropping it tends to hurt readability most.
Changing a published slug
Do not, unless you have to. A URL that has been indexed and linked to has accumulated value that a new URL starts without.
If you must change it, set a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one and keep it in place indefinitely. Internal links should be updated to point directly at the new URL rather than relying on the redirect, since each hop adds latency and a chain of redirects loses value.
A checklist
- Lowercase throughout
- Hyphens, never underscores or spaces
- No trailing hyphen
- Three to five meaningful words
- Accents transliterated, not deleted
- No dates unless the content is genuinely time-bound
- No stop-word soup, but not so terse it stops making sense
- A 301 redirect in place if it replaces an existing URL
Common questions
Hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Google has stated for years that it treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners, so `pdf_merge_tool` can be read as one token while `pdf-merge-tool` is read as three words. Hyphens are also the overwhelming convention, which matters for how readable a URL looks when shared.
What happens to accented characters?
They are transliterated to their base letter, so "café" becomes "cafe" and "Zürich" becomes "zurich". This is done by Unicode decomposition rather than a lookup table, so it works across every script that has decomposable forms. Letters with no decomposition, such as ß, ø, æ and ł, are handled by an explicit mapping.
Should slugs contain non-Latin characters?
They can. Modern browsers and Google handle percent-encoded UTF-8 slugs correctly, and a Cyrillic or Japanese slug is more readable to its audience than a transliteration. The downsides are that the raw URL looks like gibberish when copied into a plain-text context, and some older systems still mishandle it. For an Indonesian or Malay audience, Latin script means this rarely comes up.
How long should a slug be?
Three to five meaningful words. Long slugs get truncated in search results, wrap awkwardly when shared, and rarely add ranking value beyond the first few words. Never change a published slug without a 301 redirect from the old one.
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