URL Slug Generator
Note: Once a slug is published and linked, changing it breaks every one of those links unless you add a 301 redirect from the old path at the same time. Decide the slug before publishing rather than tidying it afterwards.
Accented and non-Latin characters are the interesting part. A slug can technically contain them — modern browsers display percent-encoded UTF-8 correctly — but the encoded form is what gets pasted into emails, chat messages and analytics reports, and a German title with three umlauts becomes an unreadable string of percent signs there. Transliteration avoids that: ä becomes ae, ß becomes ss, é becomes e, following the conventions of each language rather than stripping the diacritic and hoping.
Stop word removal is offered but off by default, because it is easy to overdo. Dropping the from a title is usually free; dropping it from "the sound of music" is not. Length is the constraint worth respecting instead — beyond about sixty characters a slug adds nothing for a reader or a search engine, and the first three or four meaningful words carry all of it.
Bulk mode takes a list of titles and handles the thing nobody remembers to check: two different titles very often reduce to the same slug. Duplicates are flagged rather than silently numbered, since which one gets the clean URL is a decision you should make.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I remove stop words from slugs?
Usually not. The gain is a few characters and the risk is a slug that no longer reads as the title — 'sound-of-music' and 'sound-music' are not the same thing. If a slug is too long, cut the least meaningful clause rather than filtering individual words.
Can I use non-Latin characters in a URL?
Technically yes, and browsers render them properly in the address bar. But the URL is stored and shared percent-encoded, so it becomes unreadable the moment it is pasted anywhere else. Transliteration keeps it legible everywhere.
What happens if I change a published slug?
Every existing link to that URL breaks and the accumulated ranking signals go with it, unless you add a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one. Set the redirect at the same time as the change, not later.
Underscores or hyphens?
Hyphens. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joining character, so my_blog_post is read as one token while my-blog-post is read as three words. It is one of the few genuinely settled points in URL structure.
How long should a slug be?
Under about sixty characters, and shorter is generally better. The first three or four meaningful words do all the work; everything after that is length in a link that someone has to read or type.
