Slug Generator

Turn a headline into the lowercase, hyphenated fragment that sits at the end of a URL, with accented letters folded down and punctuation collapsed as you type.

What is the Slug Generator?

A slug is the human-readable tail of a web address: the 'better-seo-tips' in example.com/blog/better-seo-tips. This tool rewrites whatever sits in the textarea into that form, lowercasing the text, mapping a set of accented Latin characters onto their plain equivalents, then turning every remaining run of non-alphanumeric characters into a single hyphen. The output line updates on each keystroke, and a Copy button lifts the finished slug to your clipboard.

Key Features

• Live rewrite on every keystroke, with no generate button to press
• Folds accented vowels plus n-tilde, c-cedilla and the German eszett
• Optional stop-word filter covering forty-six common English function words
• Separate toggles for collapsing repeated hyphens and trimming edge hyphens
• Four sample phrases load with one tap to show the behavior

Common Use Cases

• Naming a new blog post URL before it goes into the CMS
• Converting an imported product title into a clean category path segment
• Turning a conference talk name into an anchor or file name
• Checking how an accented or punctuation-heavy headline will look in a link

How to Use the Slug Generator

1. Paste or type your headline over the sample text in the Input Text box.
2. Watch the Generated Slug line update as you type; there is no button to press.
3. Leave Lowercase ticked, because the cleanup pass only recognizes a-z and 0-9.
4. Tick Remove stop words to drop filler such as 'the', 'of' and 'is' from the slug.
5. Press Copy to send the finished slug to your clipboard and confirm with the toast.

Tips for Best Results

• Apostrophes become hyphens, so 'don't' turns into 'don-t' - delete them from the input first.
• Stop-word removal matches lowercase words only, so keep the Lowercase box ticked alongside it.
• Uppercase accented letters are not mapped, so type Cafe rather than a shouty all-caps headline.
• Aim for three to five meaningful words; long slugs get truncated in search results anyway.

Why Use WiserWork's Slug Generator?

A slug is the part of a URL that a human actually reads, and it survives being pasted into chat, printed on a slide, or read aloud. Descriptive words there help people decide whether to click, and give search engines a small extra signal about what the page covers. The catch is permanence: once a slug is published and linked, editing it breaks every one of those links unless you add a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one.

Who Uses the Slug Generator?

Bloggers and content editors naming posts, developers building routes and anchor IDs, and e-commerce teams importing supplier titles into tidy category URLs. Anyone maintaining a static site, where the filename becomes the address, ends up doing this conversion by hand otherwise.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is a URL slug?

It is the readable portion of the path that identifies a single page, usually the last segment. In example.com/guides/pizza-dough, the slug is pizza-dough.

Which accented characters get converted?

The lowercase Latin vowels carrying grave, acute, circumflex, tilde or umlaut marks, plus n-tilde, c-cedilla, and the German eszett which becomes ss. Cyrillic, Greek and CJK text is not transliterated; those characters are replaced with hyphens.

Why does my slug lose its capital letters?

The final cleanup keeps only a-z and 0-9, so capitals are treated as illegal characters and become hyphens. Keep the Lowercase toggle on, which is also what most CMS platforms expect.

Do numbers survive the conversion?

Yes, digits are kept as they are, so a headline containing 2025 keeps 2025 in the slug. Years are worth a second thought, since they date the URL even after you refresh the article.

What counts as a stop word here?

Forty-six English function words: articles, common prepositions, forms of be, do and have, modal verbs, and demonstratives such as this and those. Everything else is preserved.

Should I remove stop words?

It shortens the slug but can bend the meaning - 'how-to-be-a-chef' becomes 'how-chef'. Strip them when the headline is long, keep them when the phrase only reads correctly intact.

Can I change a slug after publishing?

You can, but every existing link, bookmark and search result then points at a dead URL. Add a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one at the same moment, or leave it alone.

How long should a slug be?

Short enough to take in at a glance, typically three to five words. This tool imposes no length limit, so trim manually when the headline is a full sentence.

What happens to the text I paste in?

It stays in the page. The conversion is a handful of string replacements running in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is kept between visits.

Is there anything the tool will not catch?

It does not compare against slugs you already have, and it will not warn you when a result collides with an existing route. Both of those checks stay on your side.

Slugs are the one part of a URL that people read and remember, and they are also the part that is expensive to change later. Getting the wording right before you hit publish costs a few seconds here.