What is a URL slug?
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a single page: in https://example.com/blog/speed-up-wordpress/, the slug is speed-up-wordpress. Good slugs are short, lowercase, use hyphens between words and describe the page, so both people and search engines can guess what they will find before clicking.
This generator turns any title into a clean slug. It converts accented letters to plain ASCII (é → e, ß → ss, ø → o, ł → l), romanizes Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic, removes punctuation and apostrophes, and can drop stop words or cut the slug at a word boundary when it gets too long. Bulk mode converts a whole list of titles at once, one per line, and makes duplicates unique the way WordPress does.
The URL preview shows the slug in place under your own base URL, so you can see exactly how the link will look in search results and when shared.
How to use the Slug Generator
- Type or paste a title. Tick Bulk mode to convert a list with one title per line.
- Choose a separator (hyphens are recommended for SEO) and any options: lowercase, transliteration, stop-word removal, numbers and a maximum length.
- Enter your base URL, such as
https://example.com/blog/, to preview the full address. - Copy the slug, the URL list or download the slugs as a text file.
Example
With default options, plus Remove stop words and a 40-character limit:
Title: 10 Best Café & Coffee Shops in München — A Local’s Guide (2026)
Slug: 10-best-cafe-and-coffee-shops-in-munchen-a-locals-guide-2026
Short: 10-best-cafe-coffee-shops-munchen-localsSlugs in WordPress
WordPress creates a slug (the "post name") from the title when you first save a post, using sanitize_title(): it strips HTML, removes accents with remove_accents(), lowercases the text and replaces spaces and punctuation with hyphens. You can edit it in the block editor under Post → URL, or with Quick Edit in the posts list.
The slug only appears in the URL when Settings → Permalinks uses a structure containing %postname%, such as "Post name" (/sample-post/). With the "Plain" setting URLs look like /?p=123 and slugs are not used. If two posts would share a slug, WordPress appends -2, -3 and so on.
Slug best practices for SEO
- Short and descriptive: 3–5 meaningful words usually beats the full headline. Drop words like "a", "the" and "and" when they add nothing.
- Hyphens, not underscores: Google treats hyphens as word separators; underscores join words together.
- Lowercase only: URLs are case-sensitive on most servers, so mixed case invites duplicate pages and broken links.
- Leave out dates and numbers that will age, such as the year in an evergreen guide, unless the page really is about that year.
- Keep slugs stable. Changing a published slug breaks links and loses rankings unless you add a 301 redirect — create one with the Redirect Generator and read the WordPress redirects guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use hyphens or underscores in slugs?
Hyphens. Google's URL guidelines recommend hyphens because they are read as spaces between words, while seo_tips may be treated as one word. Underscores are fine for file names and code, not for page URLs.
How long should a URL slug be?
There is no hard limit, but slugs under about 60 characters are easier to read, share and remember, and are less likely to be truncated in search results. Use Max length to cut long slugs at a word boundary.
Can slugs contain non-English characters?
Yes — WordPress allows Unicode slugs and browsers display them, but they are percent-encoded in the actual request, so кофе becomes %D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B5. Transliterated ASCII slugs are safer to share and copy.
Should I remove stop words from slugs?
Often, yes: /best-coffee-shops-munich/ is shorter than /the-best-coffee-shops-in-munich/ and says the same. Keep them when removing changes the meaning, as in "to be or not to be".
What happens if I change a post's slug in WordPress?
WordPress stores the old slug and redirects visitors of posts to the new one, but this does not cover every content type, depends on the permalink structure, and stops working if the old slug is reused. Add an explicit 301 redirect and update internal links and your canonical URL.
Does the tool handle German umlauts?
By default ä, ö and ü become a, o and u, like WordPress's remove_accents(). Tick German umlauts for the German convention ä → ae, ö → oe, ü → ue (and ß → ss in both modes).