How it works
A slug is the readable part of a URL that identifies a page, like "best-hiking-boots" in example.com/blog/best-hiking-boots. Good slugs are short, lowercase, use hyphens between words and contain only plain letters and digits, so they never need percent-encoding.
The generator strips accents (café becomes cafe), spells out ampersands as "and", drops apostrophes so "don't" becomes "dont" rather than "don-t", and collapses every other run of punctuation or spaces into a single separator. A maximum length trims at a word boundary instead of cutting a word in half.
Search engines read hyphens as word separators but treat underscores as joining characters, which is why hyphens are the usual choice for URLs. Underscores are handy for file names and identifiers.
Frequently asked questions
Should I remove words like "the" and "of"?
Shorter slugs are easier to share and read, so dropping filler words is common. Keep them when removing them changes the meaning or makes the slug awkward.
Can I change a slug after a page is published?
You can, but add a permanent (301) redirect from the old URL so existing links and search rankings carry over.
What happens to non-Latin scripts?
Letters that cannot be reduced to plain A–Z (for example Chinese or Arabic) are removed. For those languages, consider writing the slug by hand or using a transliteration.