URL Slug Generator (SEO-friendly URLs)
Type or paste a title; the generator strips punctuation, normalizes accents, collapses whitespace, and produces a clean slug. Supports hyphens, underscores, or dots; configurable max length; optional Unicode preservation for non-Latin URLs.
how-to-build-an-adsense-ready-tool-site-2026-editionHow it works
What's a URL slug
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL after the domain — for example 'how-to-bake-bread' in '/blog/how-to-bake-bread'. Good slugs are short, descriptive, and stable. Search engines and humans both read them as part of the page's identity.
Standard rules: lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens only. Spaces become hyphens. Punctuation is removed. Stop words (the, a, is) may be omitted for brevity, though it's a stylistic choice.
ASCII vs Unicode slugs
ASCII slugs (the default): Latin letters and digits only. Universally supported, never URL-encoded, share-friendly. The standard choice for SEO-focused English/multilingual blogs.
Unicode slugs: preserve original characters in URLs. Browsers display them readably (現代日本/?lang=ja), but copy-paste produces percent-encoded URLs (%E7%8F%BE%E4%BB%A3...). Some platforms restrict Unicode slugs; check before relying on them.
When to choose Unicode: Japanese, Chinese, or Korean blog targeting native readers. The IDN URL appears clean to native users and Google indexes them well. The downside is sharing on platforms that show raw URLs.
Slug length and SEO
Google's URL display caps around 60-80 characters. Longer slugs get truncated and look 'spammy'. We default the max-length slider to 60 — short enough for most listings.
However, Google's algorithms don't penalize slug length directly. Length matters for click-through rates (humans skip long URLs) and for keeping the slug readable. Keywords in the slug help slightly with ranking; stuffing keywords into long slugs hurts more than helps.
Best practice: include the most important 2-3 keywords, drop stop words and articles, keep under 60 characters.
Frequently asked questions
›Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Google explicitly treats hyphens as word separators in URLs; underscores are treated as part of the word. So 'fast-cars' is two keywords, 'fast_cars' is one. Hyphens win for SEO.
›Should I include stop words like 'the' or 'a'?
Optional. Skipping them keeps slugs short. Including them keeps slugs readable. The SEO impact is negligible either way; readability matters more.
›What about apostrophes (it's, don't)?
We strip them. 'don't' becomes 'dont'. Some generators preserve them as parts of words; we follow the simpler convention.
›Does this handle Japanese / Chinese?
Yes — toggle 'Allow Unicode' to keep CJK characters in the slug. Without that flag, CJK characters are stripped (since they have no ASCII equivalent).
›Why is my Korean slug becoming empty in ASCII mode?
Korean characters don't have direct ASCII equivalents. Either enable Unicode mode, or transliterate manually before pasting.
›Are emoji preserved?
Yes in Unicode mode. URL-encoded emoji are valid but ugly — most platforms strip them. Practical advice: don't use emoji in slugs.
›What's the maximum slug length I should use?
60 characters or less is the sweet spot for SEO and CTR. Some CMS systems cap at 200 characters. Google's index supports much longer but rarely benefits readability.
›Does the data leave my browser?
No. Generation runs locally; nothing is sent to a server.
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