URL Slug Generator

A URL slug generator turns a page title into the clean, readable part of a web address that comes after your domain, such as /boiler-repair-leeds/. Our free tool converts text to lower case, joins words with hyphens or underscores, strips accents so café becomes cafe, removes symbols, turns & into and, and can drop stop words and cap the length. Bulk mode converts a whole list of titles at once, one per line, and you can copy every slug in one go. It runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

How to use the Slug generator

1. 1 Paste a titleType or paste the page or post title. The slug appears as you type.
2. 2 Choose the separatorHyphens are the standard for web addresses. Pick underscores only if your system or file naming convention needs them.
3. 3 Decide on stop wordsTick remove stop words to drop short words such as the, a, and and of. Untick it if the slug no longer makes sense.
4. 4 Set a maximum lengthOptionally cap the slug length. The tool trims at a word boundary so you do not end up with half a word.
5. 5 Convert in bulk and copySwitch on bulk mode, paste one title per line and copy all the slugs at once for a spreadsheet, import file or CMS.

What a URL slug is

The slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a particular page. In https://www.example.co.uk/services/boiler-repair-leeds/, the slug is boiler-repair-leeds. Most content management systems, including WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace, create a slug automatically from the page title, but the automatic version is often too long, full of filler words or awkward when the title contains symbols.

A good slug tells people and search engines what the page is about before they click. It appears in search results as part of the breadcrumb-style URL, in links shared on social media and messaging apps, and in your own analytics reports, so a clear one pays off in several places.

Slugs are also hard to change later without redirects, so it is worth getting them right before a page goes live. A few seconds spent turning Our Brand New Autumn 2026 Garden Room Range Is Here! into garden-rooms gives you an address that still makes sense years later, after the range, the season and the wording of the title have all changed. Think of the slug as the permanent label for the topic of the page, rather than a copy of its headline.

What makes a good slug

Google's own guidance on URL structure recommends simple, descriptive words, and suggests using hyphens rather than underscores to separate them. Beyond that, the aim is a slug that is short, readable and stable.

• Lower case only: some servers treat /Boiler-Repair and /boiler-repair as different pages, which can create duplicates.
• Hyphens between words: Google treats hyphens as separators, so boiler-repair is read as two words.
• Descriptive, not cryptic: /emergency-plumber-bristol beats /page?id=4721 or /p/2026/10/22/post-3.
• Short enough to read at a glance: drop words that add nothing, but keep the meaning.
• No dates unless the content is truly tied to a date: a dated slug makes evergreen content look old and makes updating it awkward.
• Plain ASCII characters: accents, spaces and symbols get encoded into strings like %C3%A9 and %20, which look messy when shared.

How the generator cleans your text

The generator first converts accented letters to their plain equivalents, so crème brûlée becomes creme brulee and Zürich becomes zurich. It then replaces & with and and £ with gbp, removes apostrophes so that Smith's Bakery becomes smiths-bakery rather than smith-s-bakery, and turns every other run of spaces and punctuation into a single separator. Separators at the start and end are trimmed, and repeated separators are collapsed into one.

If you tick remove stop words, common filler words such as a, an, the, and, of, to and for are dropped. With a maximum length set, the slug is trimmed back to the last complete word under the limit. The result is a slug you can paste straight into the URL or permalink field of your CMS.

Numbers are kept, because they often matter: a page about the 2026 rugby fixtures or a product called Model 300 needs them. Words from other alphabets, such as Greek or Cyrillic, are removed rather than transliterated, so if your titles use them, write the slug by hand in Latin letters. The original title is shown above each slug, so it is easy to spot if a title has lost something important.

Stop words and slug length

Removing stop words makes slugs shorter and often tidier: The Complete Guide to Garden Rooms in Kent becomes complete-guide-garden-rooms-kent. But sometimes the small words carry meaning. A slug for To Let in Glasgow loses its sense entirely without to, and a page about The Who should not become who. Always read the result back before you use it.

There is no official maximum length, and Google can handle long URLs. Shorter slugs are simply easier to read, share and remember, and they are less likely to be cut off in search results and messages. As a practical guide, three to six meaningful words is usually plenty.

Bulk mode for migrations and new sites

Bulk mode is useful when you are planning a new site, importing products or migrating from one platform to another. Paste a column of titles from a spreadsheet, one per line, and copy back a matching column of slugs. Each line is converted independently, so the output lines up with your original list, and you can convert up to 500 titles at a time. Blank lines are skipped.

Check the bulk results for duplicates before you import them. Two products called Oak Dining Table, for example, will produce the same slug, and most systems will add -2 to one of them automatically. It is usually better to make each slug distinct yourself, perhaps by adding a size or colour.

When migrating, keep a spreadsheet with three columns: the old URL, the new slug and the full new URL. That sheet becomes your redirect map, so every old address can be pointed to its new home with a 301 redirect on launch day.

Changing slugs on live pages

A slug is part of the page's address, so changing it effectively moves the page. Links from other websites, your own internal links, bookmarks and search results will all point to the old address. If you change a slug, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one and update your internal links and XML sitemap.

WordPress tries to redirect changed post slugs automatically, and Shopify offers to create a redirect when you edit a product handle, but do not rely on that for every platform. After any change, use our Redirect Checker to confirm the old URL returns a single 301 to the new page rather than a 404 or a chain of redirects.

Examples you can copy

Boiler Repair & Servicing in Leeds          boiler-repair-and-servicing-in-leeds
  (stop words removed)                      boiler-repair-servicing-leeds
Smith's Bakery: Our Story                   smiths-bakery-our-story
Crème Brûlée Recipe (Easy!)                 creme-brulee-recipe-easy
10 Tips for First-Time Buyers in 2026       10-tips-for-first-time-buyers-in-2026
  (better for evergreen content)            first-time-buyer-tips

Redirect 301 /blog/our-new-boiler-servicing-offer-for-autumn/ https://www.example.co.uk/blog/boiler-servicing-offer/

Common mistakes to avoid

Frequently asked questions