URL Slug Generator
Paste one page title or a whole column of them. Get a clean, lowercase, hyphenated slug for each — accents flattened, emoji and punctuation gone, stop words optional, with a character count and a full URL preview.
Your page titles
url-slug-generator in digitalhangover.in/tools/url-slug-generator/. A good one is lowercase, hyphen-separated, three to five real words long, free of dates and stop words, and it never changes once the page is live.How to use the generator
- Paste your titles One per line. If you are planning a month of content, copy the title column straight out of the calendar — the tool handles the whole batch in one pass, which is the bit most slug generators make you do fifty times.
- Set the length you want The counter beside each slug turns amber past 75 characters. That is a readability line, not a Google penalty line — long URLs get truncated in search results and look untrustworthy when shared.
- Decide on stop words and numbers Stop words off is the DH default. Numbers are worth keeping when they are part of the topic ("google-analytics-4") and worth dropping when they are a year that will age ("guide-2026").
- Check the preview URL, then copy Type your own domain in and every row shows the full URL it will produce. Copy one slug, or copy the whole batch as slugs or as URLs.
What the generator does to your title
Seven transformations run in order. Knowing the order matters, because a couple of them interact — the ampersand becomes the word "and", and "and" is itself a stop word, so with both defaults on Small Businesses & Startups collapses to small-businesses-startups.
| Step | What happens | Example in | Example out |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Accents | Diacritics flattened to plain ASCII | Café résumé | cafe-resume |
| 2. Ampersands | & becomes the word "and" | Tools & Tactics | tools-and-tactics |
| 3. Apostrophes | Dropped, not hyphenated | Google's Update | googles-update |
| 4. Everything else | Punctuation, emoji and symbols become separators | SEO Audit! 🚀 (Free) | seo-audit-free |
| 5. Collapse | Repeated hyphens squeezed to one, leading and trailing hyphens trimmed | — Guide — | guide |
| 6. Stop words | Optional: the 13-word list is removed, whole words only | The Best of SEO | best-seo |
| 7. Length | Optional: cut at the last whole word inside your limit | (long title) | (no half-words) |
Why stop words and length are worth a toggle
Removing stop words is a readability decision more than a ranking one. Google has been comfortable ignoring "the" and "for" in a URL for well over a decade, so /best-seo-tools-for-small-business/ is not going to lose to /best-seo-tools-small-business/ on that basis alone. What you gain is a shorter, cleaner string that survives being pasted into a WhatsApp message or read out on a call.
The exception is when a stop word carries actual meaning. The Office is not office. Cost of Sales is not cost sales. The toggle exists because no rule survives every title — turn it off for those, and keep it on for the other ninety percent.
Length works the same way. There is no character count at which a URL stops ranking. There is a point at which it stops being read, and that point arrives early: search results truncate, social cards truncate, and a URL with eleven hyphens in it looks auto-generated because it usually is. Three to five words is the target; the 75-character flag is a nudge, not a wall.
What this tool cannot do
It cleans a string. That is the whole job, and it is worth being clear about the three things it is not doing.
- It cannot see your site. If
/seo-audit-checklist/already exists, this tool will happily hand you that slug again — it has no way of knowing. Check your own URL list, or your CMS, before you publish. Our SEO audit checklist covers finding duplicate and near-duplicate URLs across a site. - It does not check keywords. No search volume, no difficulty, no opinion on whether the words in your title are the words people search. The slug reflects the title you gave it, nothing more.
- It cannot redirect anything. This is the one that costs money. If the page is already live and you change its slug, the old URL 404s and every link and ranking it earned goes with it — unless you put a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Generate slugs freely for pages that do not exist yet; for pages that do, treat a slug change as a migration, not an edit.
One more limit worth naming: non-Latin scripts are not transliterated. Paste a Devanagari or Tamil title and there are no ASCII characters left after cleaning, so the tool tells you the slug is empty rather than quietly returning nothing.
Where to go next
The slug is one line of a page's URL structure. How those URLs connect to each other is internal linking, and what happens when two URLs serve the same content is canonical tags — both sit upstream of anything a slug generator can fix. The complete SEO guide is the map for the rest, and the other free tools cover the neighbouring jobs.
Frequently asked questions
What is a URL slug?
The slug is the part of a URL that names one specific page — the last segment, after the folder path. In digitalhangover.in/tools/url-slug-generator/, the slug is url-slug-generator. It is the only part of a URL that both a person and a search engine read as a description of what the page is about, which is why it is worth getting right before you publish rather than after.
Should I remove stop words from my slugs?
Usually yes, for length and readability — not because Google penalises them. The exception is any title where the stop word changes the meaning: "cost of sales" and "cost sales" are not the same phrase. The toggle on this tool exists for exactly that case. Our house rule is stop words off by default, on when the phrase breaks without them.
Hyphens or underscores in a URL?
Hyphens. Google has treated a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner since the mid-2000s, which means seo_audit_checklist can be read as one long token rather than three words. Underscores are also harder to see in an underlined link. Every DH slug uses hyphens.
Can I change a slug on a page that is already live?
You can, but it is a migration, not an edit. The old URL stops existing the moment you save, so it needs a 301 redirect pointing at the new one — otherwise every backlink, every bookmark and every ranking signal attached to the old URL is thrown away. If the current slug is merely imperfect rather than actively wrong, leaving it alone is often the better call.
Is anything I paste in here sent to you?
No. Every slug is generated in your browser as you type. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, nothing is remembered between visits — refresh the page and it is gone. The tool works with the network disconnected once the page has loaded.
Clean slugs on a messy URL structure still lose.
Send us your site. We will tell you which URLs are duplicated, which are orphaned, and which ones you should not touch without a redirect plan.