This turns any title or phrase into a clean, URL friendly slug, lowercase, separated by hyphens or underscores, with punctuation and accented letters stripped out. It's the small transformation behind almost every readable web address, turning something like My First Blog Post into my-first-blog-post so it can live safely inside a URL.
How to use it
- Type or paste the title you want to convert.
- Choose whether the result should be forced to lowercase, the usual convention for URLs.
- Pick a separator, hyphens or underscores, depending on what your platform expects.
- Read the generated slug right below.
- Copy it into a URL, a filename, or an identifier.
When it helps
- Creating a clean URL for a new blog post based on its title.
- Generating a consistent filename from a document title before saving it.
- Building unique, readable identifiers for database records, like product names.
- Turning a heading into an anchor link for in page navigation.
- Cleaning up user submitted text before it's used somewhere that needs a safe, predictable string.
Good to know
- Stick with hyphens rather than underscores for a web URL specifically. Search engines generally treat hyphens as word separators, which helps readability and SEO.
- Keep slugs reasonably short and descriptive instead of copying an entire long title.
- Avoid changing a slug that's already live and indexed, since that breaks existing links even if the title changes later.
- When migrating an old site, keep a map from old URLs to new slugs if you regenerate them, so existing links and search rankings aren't lost.
- If your platform automatically generates a slug from a title, use this tool first to see what result you're aiming for, then compare it against what the platform actually produces.
Questions
Why are accented letters removed instead of kept?
A URL is safest and most compatible when it sticks to plain characters, so an accented letter like e with an accent gets converted to its closest plain equivalent, or removed, rather than left in a form that could cause encoding problems.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens are the more common choice for web URLs, since search engines treat them as word boundaries. Underscores are sometimes preferred for filenames or code identifiers instead.
What happens to numbers in the original text?
They're kept as they are, since numbers are already safe characters in a URL and don't need converting.
Will this handle emoji in the input?
Emoji and most symbols get stripped out entirely, since they aren't reliable characters for a URL.
Is there a recommended maximum slug length?
No hard limit, but a shorter slug, well under 60 characters, tends to be more readable and is commonly recommended.
Does capitalisation in the middle of a word, like McDonald, convert oddly?
It gets treated as regular letters and lowercased along with everything else if lowercase is turned on, so it comes out as mcdonald rather than keeping the internal capital.