Slug Generator: Make a Clean URL Slug from Any Title (with Transliteration)

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Slug Generator: Make a Clean URL Slug from Any Title

A slug is the part of a web address that names a page: in https://example.com/blog/how-to-make-coffee the slug is how-to-make-coffee. This tool turns a title into such a slug: lower case words, joined by a dash, with no accents, no signs and no spaces. Paste one title or a whole list, and you get the slugs at once. Everything happens in your browser, so your titles are not sent anywhere.

How to use it

1. Write the title in the left box. For many pages write one title on each line.
2. The slugs appear on the right. Under the boxes you can see the whole address, if you write the beginning of your address in the field.
3. Change the options if you need to, then press "Copy the slugs", or "Copy the full addresses" to take the whole list with the address in front.

What the tool does

• Cleans the title: makes it lower case, takes out the signs and joins the words with a dash (or an underscore or a dot). The apostrophe is removed without a gap, so "don't" is "dont" and "John's" is "johns".
• Writes Cyrillic and accented letters in Latin. Russian and Ukrainian are found by the letters, and each follows its own rules (the Ukrainian Г is "h" and И is "y", the Russian Г is "g"). Letters with accents lose them (é is e, ø is o, ß is ss). The option for German writes ä, ö, ü as ae, oe, ue.
• Leaves out the numbers, the small English words (the, and, of, to...) and any other words that you list.
• Limits the length. The slug is cut at the end of a word, never in the middle, and the page tells you that it was cut.
• Makes a list of slugs, and keeps them different: if two titles give the same slug, the second gets "-2", the third "-3".

Examples with the default options:

What makes a good slug

• Lower case and a dash between the words. Search engines read a dash as a space between words. Google recommends dashes, and not underscores, in addresses. Some servers treat Page and page as two different addresses, so lower case is the safe choice.
• Short and clear. The slug should say what the page is about in a few words. There is no strict limit, but a short address is easier to read, to say and to share, and it is not cut in a message or in a search result.
• The small words are your choice. Words like "the" or "of" are not needed for a search engine to understand the page, and leaving them out makes the address shorter. Do not leave them out if the meaning changes.
• No dates and no numbers that will change, unless the page is about them: "top-10-tips" will be old when you add the eleventh.
• Do not change the slug of a published page without a redirect (301) from the old address, or you lose the visits and the links to the page.

Slugs with Cyrillic, Chinese or other letters

A slug may have letters of any alphabet, and browsers show them as they are. But when you copy such an address, it turns into %D0%BF%D1%80..., which is long and hard to read in a message, in an e-mail or in a log. This is why many sites write Cyrillic titles in Latin letters. For Russian and Ukrainian the tool does it by the usual rules. For Chinese, Arabic and the alphabets without a ready table the letters stay (the option "Keep the letters that cannot be written in Latin" is on), and the page shows how the slug will look in an address. To percent-encode or decode an address by yourself use the URL decoder and encoder.

WordPress, static sites and code

• WordPress makes the slug of a post from its title (the function sanitize_title): it removes the accents and the signs but keeps Cyrillic letters. The slug can be changed in the editor in the field "Slug" (in the settings of the post, in the part for the address), and in Settings, Permalinks you choose that the address has the post name. Paste the slug from this page into that field.
• Static site generators use a file name or a field of the page; for example, Hugo has a slug field in the front matter.
• JavaScript (for Latin text with accents):

const slug = (text) => text.normalize("NFD").replace(/[̀-ͯ]/g, "")
    .toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0-9]+/g, "-").replace(/^-+|-+$/g, "");

slug("Hello, World!");   // "hello-world"

• PHP (Laravel): Str::slug("Hello, World!") gives hello-world.
• Python: from django.utils.text import slugify and slugify("Hello, World!") give hello-world; the package python-slugify does the same with from slugify import slugify.

Related tools

To look at the parts of an address use the URL parser, and to add campaign tags to links the UTM link generator (or the bulk UTM builder for a list). For domains with national letters see the IDN Punycode converter. To check the length of a title use the character counter, and to sort a list of slugs or remove the repeated lines the sort and shuffle lines tool.

Limitations

• The writing in Latin follows the usual rules of the Russian and Ukrainian languages, but it is not an official transliteration for documents. Other alphabets are not changed, except the letters with accents.
• The list of the small words is English only. You can add the words of another language in the field "Also leave out these words".
• The tool does not check if a slug is already used on your site. It only makes the repeated slugs of one list different.
• Your titles are not saved. Only the choice of the options stays in this browser.