Text to Slug
Free text-to-slug generator. Convert any title or string into a clean URL-safe slug — lowercase, hyphenated, accent-stripped, ready for SEO permalinks.
Quick answer
Slugify converts a title to lowercase, strips accents, replaces spaces with hyphens, removes punctuation, and collapses multiple hyphens. 'How to Bake — A Beginner's Guide!' becomes 'how-to-bake-a-beginners-guide'.
Text to Slug (URL-Safe)
Slug
How it works
Lowercases the text, removes accents and diacritics, strips punctuation and special characters, replaces spaces and remaining symbols with the chosen separator, and collapses repeated separators. The result is safe to use in URLs, file names, and database keys.
When to use it
Generating blog post URLs, creating clean file names from titles, building API endpoints, making CSS class names from human-readable strings, or any time you need a "code-safe" version of normal text.
Common mistakes
Forgetting that some characters (curly apostrophes from Word, em-dashes, smart quotes) get stripped. If your output is missing letters, check the input for hidden Unicode characters first.
How slugification works
The tool applies a deterministic chain of transforms: (1) lowercase the input, (2) NFD-normalize Unicode and strip combining marks (so 'é' becomes 'e'), (3) replace whitespace with hyphens, (4) remove characters that aren't a-z, 0-9, or hyphen, (5) collapse runs of consecutive hyphens to one, and (6) trim leading/trailing hyphens. The result is a URL-safe, SEO-friendly slug. Browsers, servers, and search engines all handle hyphens consistently — they don't need encoding and they're treated as word separators.
When to use it
Generating permalinks for blog posts and articles. Naming files for upload (avoid spaces and special characters in production filenames). Creating URL-safe identifiers for entities in your application. Standardizing tags or category names. Converting Excel column headers to safe identifiers in code.
Common mistakes
- Including stop words. 'how-to-make-a-cake' is fine, but for SEO some prefer stripping 'a', 'the', 'and' to produce 'make-cake'. Both work — pick a convention and stay consistent.
- Letting slugs get too long. Cap slugs at ~60 characters. Title 'Why You Should Never Buy A Used Car From A Friend Of A Friend No Matter How Cheap' is fine; the slug should be 'never-buy-used-car-from-friend' or similar.
- Slugifying the same title twice differently. 'My Post' on day 1 vs. 'my post' on day 2 should produce the same slug. Always slugify before storage, then reuse — don't recompute live every time.
Frequently asked questions
What is a slug in web development?
A slug is a URL-friendly string derived from a title or name — lowercase, hyphenated, with non-alphanumeric characters stripped. The slug for 'My First Blog Post!' would be 'my-first-blog-post'. Slugs are used in permalinks, file names, and database identifiers.
Why use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs?
Google has confirmed that hyphens are treated as word separators in URLs, while underscores are not. 'my-first-post' is parsed as three words; 'my_first_post' is parsed as one. Hyphens are the SEO-recommended convention.
How do I handle non-English characters in slugs?
The tool transliterates accented characters to ASCII (é → e, ñ → n) and strips characters outside a-z and 0-9. For Chinese, Arabic, or other non-Latin scripts, the result will be empty — for those cases, transliteration libraries like unidecode work better than ASCII-only stripping.