Why slugs matter
The slug is the human-readable part of a URL — and it's a ranking signal and a UX signal: /my-awesome-blog-post tells both Google and readers what the page is about, while /p/12345 tells nothing. Good slugs are lowercase, hyphen-separated, and drop stop words (a, the, and) when it makes them shorter without losing meaning.
What this tool does
- Normalizes: trims, lowercases, replaces spaces with the separator of your choice.
- Strips punctuation:
!!,(), quotes and other URL-hostile characters go away. - Handles Unicode: accented Latin letters are transliterated (
café→cafe); CJK and emoji are dropped (URLs don't do them well). - Optional length cap: cut long titles at a word boundary so slugs stay readable.
Slug best practices
- Keep it under 60 characters — Google truncates longer slugs in results.
- Use hyphens (Google reads them as word separators; underscores are treated as part of a word).
- Don't include dates unless your site structure requires it — evergreen content with dates looks stale.
- Changing a slug after publishing breaks links — set it once, right.