A slug is the human-readable part of a URL — the bit between the trailing slash and the query string. Good slugs are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated and contain only ASCII letters and digits, so they survive being shared in chat, copied into terminals, and stored as filenames or S3 keys.
This generator does the four things every slug needs: Unicode-folds accented characters to plain ASCII, lowercases everything, replaces all non-alphanumeric runs with a single hyphen, and trims leading/trailing hyphens. Optional stop-word removal cleans up titles like "How to Use the Slug Generator" into a tighter "use-slug-generator".
Google has explicitly stated that it treats hyphens as word separators in URLs, while underscores are treated as joiners. "free-online-tool" parses as three words, "free_online_tool" parses as one — hyphens are better for SEO.
They are normalised with Unicode NFD decomposition, then the combining diacritical marks are stripped — so "résumé" becomes "resume", "naïve" becomes "naive". Non-Latin scripts (Cyrillic, Greek, CJK) are kept as-is unless you transliterate them upstream.
It depends. Shorter slugs are cleaner and Google ignores tiny stop-words anyway. But removing too aggressively can break readability — "cat-vs-dog" reads better than "cat-dog". Use the toggle when slugs are getting unwieldy.
Yes — only the unreserved URL characters [a-z0-9-] are kept. There's no need to URL-encode the result, and it round-trips cleanly through HTTP, S3 keys, file systems and most CMSes.
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