Free URL Slug Generator: Clean Slugs Without Leaving Your Browser

The slug is the last segment of the path — the piece that names the individual page. Everything before it is address and filing.

Take a real URL from this site and split it:

Most definitions you'll read say the slug is "everything after the domain name". That's true for a page sitting at the root and wrong for anything in a folder, which is most pages on most sites. The distinction matters when you're planning a URL, because the folder is doing half the descriptive work. /blog/technical-seo-audit doesn't need the word "blog" in its slug — it's already there, one level up.

A slug has two jobs. It tells a person what a page is before they click, and it keeps telling them after the link has been pasted somewhere stripped of its title — a message, a spreadsheet, a citation in someone else's post. That second job is the one people forget, and it's the reason a slug outlives the headline it came from.

Four rules, applied in order, in your browser:

1. Every run of characters that isn't a letter, a digit or a hyphen becomes a single hyphen.
2. Repeated hyphens collapse into one.
3. Hyphens at the start and end are trimmed off.
4. The whole string is lowercased.

"Letter" means a letter in any script, not just A–Z. That single decision explains most of the surprising output below.

Here's what the shipped transform does to real input. We ran these through the function on 8 August 2026; paste any of them into the box above and you'll get the same thing back.

Two rows there are worth pausing on. The apostrophe case is the one that catches people: google-s-guide-to-urls is a perfectly valid URL and it looks like a typo. Retype the phrase without the apostrophe before you copy. And the punctuation case shows why pasting a price or a stat straight in rarely works — price-49-99-50-off has lost the information that made it readable.

Nothing here is guesswork on our part. The transform is four lines of code with no configuration, no dictionary and no model behind it, which is why the same input always produces the same output. If two people on your team slug the same headline, they get the same URL.

More than the marketing on most slug tools would suggest.

It doesn't remove stop words. Paste "The Best Guide to the Art of the Deal" and every the and of comes back attached. Plenty of generators strip those automatically. We don't, because the decision isn't as safe as it looks — "how to fix a leak" and "how fix leak" carry different meanings to a reader, and the second one reads like machine output. Delete the filler in the input box instead. The slug shortens as you type, so you can see what you're losing.

It doesn't shorten anything. There's no character cap and no truncation. A 90-character headline produces a 90-character slug. That's your call to make, not ours to make silently.

It doesn't add keywords. A generator can't know what the page is meant to rank for. If the phrase you paste doesn't contain your target words, neither will the slug.

It doesn't transliterate. ü stays ü; it doesn't become ue or u. More on that below.

It doesn't check anything about your site. Whether the slug is already taken, whether the page exists, whether changing it is a good idea — all outside what a text transform can see. For the published side of that, run a full site audit and check the URLs you actually shipped.

Three to five words, in practice. There's no threshold you're penalised for crossing, and this tool enforces nothing, so the constraint is entirely about readability.

Two places long slugs get cut in the real world: the URL Google displays in a result, and the link preview when someone drops the address into Slack or a message. A slug you can read out loud without losing the thread survives both.

What to leave out is easier to specify than what to put in:

• Dates and years. /best-rank-trackers-2026 needs rewriting every January, and rewriting a URL is expensive (next section). /best-rank-trackers doesn't.
• The folder's word. If the page is at /blog/, the slug doesn't need "blog" or "article" in it.
• Listicle numbers. /12-seo-tips becomes a lie the moment you add a thirteenth.
• Superlatives from the headline. "Ultimate", "complete", "definitive" — none of them describe the topic.
• Stop words that aren't doing work. Keep the ones that are.

Repeating your target keyword in the folder and again in the slug doesn't compound. Google's URL structure guidance warns against overly complex URLs and recommends simple, descriptive words in the language of your audience — that's the whole brief.

This is the question the tool can't answer for you, and the one worth thinking hardest about.

Renaming a published URL breaks the old address. Every external link, bookmark, shared message and cached search result pointing at it returns a 404 unless you put a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Google's documentation is unambiguous that a permanent redirect is what you use here.

Even done properly, expect a quiet period while the new URL is crawled and the old one's signals consolidate onto it. How long depends on how often the page gets crawled, which you don't control.

Two habits keep the damage small:

Redirect to the final destination, not the previous step. If /old-name already points at /newer-name and you rename again, point /old-name at the new address directly rather than letting it hop through. Chains accumulate quietly — across the sites we audited in the first half of 2026, redirect chains of two or more hops were among the ten most common failures our engine finds. Re-check yours with the redirect checker after any rename.

Update your own internal links. A redirect is a safety net for links you don't control. The ones inside your own site you can just fix, and leaving them pointing at a dead address wastes crawl budget for no reason. The internal link checker will show you which links on a page point where.

The practical conclusion: decide the slug before the page is published for the first time. After that, only rename when the URL is actively wrong — a typo, a product that changed its name, a path that contradicts the page. Tidiness is not a good enough reason.

They're kept. This surprises people, so here's what it looks like in practice, and why it's deliberate.

Ärzte für Zahnmedizin becomes ärzte-für-zahnmedizin. Что такое SEO becomes что-такое-seo. The tool lowercases the characters and leaves them alone otherwise. That follows Google's URL guidance, which recommends UTF-8 encoding for non-ASCII characters rather than stripping them.

The confusion comes later, when the URL shows up somewhere as percent-encoded:

Same URL, two representations. Browsers display the readable form in the address bar and transmit the encoded one; analytics tools and server logs usually record the encoded version, which is why a German site's reports can look like line noise.

None of that breaks anything. But it's a reason plenty of teams choose to spell umlauts out instead — /ueber-uns rather than /über-uns — and either convention is defensible. What isn't defensible is having both on the same site. The tool won't make the choice for you: if you want ue, type ue in the input.

One caveat if you publish in a script that doesn't use spaces. 日本語のタイトル comes back unchanged, with no hyphens at all, because there were no space characters to convert. That's correct behaviour and it may not be what you want. Add your own separators before you paste.