What a slug is, and what this generator does
A slug is the part of a web address that names the page: in example.com/blog/my-great-guide, the slug is "my-great-guide". Slugs have strict rules — addresses cannot contain spaces, capital letters are a invitation to inconsistency, and most punctuation is either illegal or encoded into ugly percent-signs. Type any title into the box above and this generator applies the standard cleaning instantly, updating as you type: it lowercases everything, strips out punctuation and symbols, turns runs of spaces into single hyphens, collapses repeated hyphens, and trims any hyphen left dangling at the start or end. What remains is a slug you can paste into WordPress, Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace or a hand-built site exactly as it comes out.
Underscores and numbers are kept — both are legal in URLs — and repeated words are left alone, because a generator should clean a title, not edit it. If the title has filler words you do not want in the address, delete them in the title box and watch the slug follow.
Slug best practices
- Keep it short. Three to five words is the sweet spot. "sourdough-bread-guide" beats "my-great-guide-to-making-sourdough-bread-at-home" — long slugs get truncated in search results and social shares.
- Keep the keywords, drop the filler. Words like "a", "the" and "my" add length without helping anyone find the page. Search engines read slugs as a relevance hint, so the words that remain should be the words people search for.
- Use hyphens, not underscores. Google has long treated hyphens as word separators in URLs and underscores as joiners, so "bread-guide" reads as two words where "bread_guide" may read as one. Every major CMS defaults to hyphens for this reason.
- Set it before you publish, and then leave it. Changing a slug changes the address, which breaks every link, bookmark and search result pointing to the old one unless you set up a redirect. Pick the slug at publishing time and treat it as permanent.
- Lowercase, always. Some servers treat "Guide" and "guide" as different pages. An all-lowercase slug removes a whole category of duplicate-page and broken-link problems.
Where slugs show up
Blog posts and articles are the obvious case, but slugs also name product pages in online shops, category pages, help articles, and even the file names of downloadable documents. Anywhere a human might read, type or share an address, a clean slug earns its keep: it fits on a business card, survives being read aloud over the phone, and tells a searcher what the page is before they click. If you are naming files rather than web pages, the same output works — just keep the hyphens and lowercase and your files will move happily between Windows, Mac and Linux.
Frequently asked questions
What characters does the generator remove?
Everything except letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens: punctuation, symbols, and extra spaces are stripped or converted. Accented letters (such as é) are removed rather than transliterated, so 'café' becomes 'caf' — if those letters matter, retype that word in plain letters first.
Why hyphens instead of underscores?
Search engines treat hyphens as word separators in URLs and underscores as part of a single word. Hyphens are also the convention used by WordPress and most other platforms, so slugs generated here drop straight into any CMS.
Should I include the whole title in the slug?
Usually not all of it. Keep the words people would search for and drop filler like 'a', 'the', 'my' and 'great'. A slug of three to five meaningful words is easier to read, share and remember.
Can I use the result as a file name?
Yes — the same cleaned text makes a safe, portable file name on any operating system. Just add the extension, for example 'sourdough-bread-guide.pdf'.
Private by design: this generator runs entirely in your browser. Text you type here is never uploaded, stored or shared.