Slugify

What is a slug and why it matters

A slug is the readable identifier at the end of a URL — the part that comes from a page's title. Clean slugs matter for usability and SEO: a link like /blog/best-coffee-shops tells a reader exactly what to expect, where /blog/post?id=4821 tells them nothing. Search engines also use slug words as a ranking and relevance signal. This tool converts any title into a safe slug by lowercasing text, replacing spaces and punctuation with a single separator, and stripping characters that don't belong in a URL.

Choosing the right options

Use hyphens as your separator unless a system forces underscores — Google reads hyphens as spaces between words. Keep lowercase on, because URLs can be case-sensitive and mixed case invites duplicate-content confusion. Turn on transliteration to fold accented characters down to ASCII so café becomes cafe and you avoid ugly percent-encoding. Enable stopword stripping when you want a shorter, keyword-dense slug, and set a max length to keep things tidy.

Common slug pitfalls

Avoid spaces (they become %20), uppercase letters, and special characters like & ? # which carry meaning in URLs. Don't leave a trailing separator, and don't stuff every word in — long slugs get truncated in search results and are harder to share. Once a slug is published and indexed, changing it breaks existing links, so set up a redirect if you must. The live before/after view here lets you check the result before you commit it to a permalink.