Text to URL Slug
Convert any title into a clean SEO-friendly URL slug.
About the Text to URL Slug
The Text to Slug Converter transforms a human-readable title into a URL-safe slug. Slugs are the trailing part of a URL that identifies a specific page: in ht99.icu/blog/10-best-seo-strategies-2025, the slug is 10-best-seo-strategies-2025. A good slug is lowercase, contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens, and is readable enough that a user can guess the page content from the URL alone.
Search engines and users both prefer clean URLs. Google's Search Essentials documentation recommends simple, human-readable URLs because they are easier to share, remember, and crawl. A URL like ?p=12345 tells the user nothing; a URL like /blog/how-to-bake-sourdough-bread tells them exactly what to expect. URLs also appear in search results, and descriptive slugs can improve click-through rates. For a deeper dive, see our guide to writing perfect URL slugs.
This tool handles the common transformations needed to produce a clean slug: lowercasing, removing punctuation, collapsing whitespace, replacing spaces with hyphens, stripping leading and trailing separators, and optionally removing stop words to keep the slug concise. It also handles non-ASCII characters by stripping them (useful for ensuring compatibility with legacy systems).
How It Works
The slug generation follows a multi-step pipeline. First, the input is trimmed and optionally lowercased. If stop-word removal is enabled, common English articles and prepositions (a, an, the, of, in, on, to, for, and, or, but, is, at, by, with, from) are stripped using a regex with word boundaries.
Next, non-ASCII characters are optionally removed (anything outside the printable ASCII range 0x20-0x7E). This handles accented characters, CJK characters, and emoji. For a Unicode-aware approach that transliterates é to “e” and ñ to “n”, you would need a library like lodash's _.kebabCase or the ICU transliteration API.
The remaining text is stripped of all characters except letters, numbers, spaces, and hyphens. Then runs of whitespace, underscores, and hyphens are collapsed to a single separator (hyphen or underscore based on your choice). Finally, leading and trailing separators are removed. The result is a clean slug ready to append to your URL.
Worked Examples
The default title “10 Best SEO Strategies for 2025 (Updated!)” produces the slug 10-best-seo-strategies-for-2025-updated. The parentheses and exclamation mark are removed, spaces become hyphens, and the text is lowercased.
Enable stop-word removal and the same title produces 10-best-seo-strategies-2025-updated — shorter and arguably cleaner. The stop word “for” was removed. This is a matter of preference; some SEOs prefer to keep stop words for readability, others strip them for brevity.
For a title like “Café Menu: Coffee & Pastries”, the tool (with ASCII stripping enabled) produces caf-menu-coffee-pastries. The é is removed, leaving “caf” rather than “cafe.” For proper transliteration, use a dedicated slugify library that handles Unicode normalization (NFKD) and combining character stripping.
When to Use This Tool
- Generating URL slugs for blog posts and articles in WordPress, Ghost, or static site generators.
- Creating anchor links for section headings within a long page.
- Producing file names for downloaded assets (PDFs, images) that are URL-safe.
- Generating CSS class names from human-readable component names.
- Creating hashtag strings from event or campaign titles.
- Producing email-safe subject line identifiers for tracking.
- Generating Kubernetes resource names (which must be lowercase DNS-1123 labels).
Limitations & Disclaimer
This tool strips non-ASCII characters rather than transliterating them. For proper Unicode handling, use a library like slugify (npm) or python-slugify that performs NFKD normalization and transliteration. The stop-word list is English-only; non-English content will not benefit from stop-word removal. The tool does not check for slug uniqueness or URL conflicts — verify manually that your slug does not collide with an existing page. See our disclaimer for full terms and read our URL slug best practices article for more context.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?
Google treats hyphens as word separators but historically treated underscores as part of the word. Matt Cutts confirmed this in 2007 and it remains Google's recommendation. Use hyphens for SEO. Underscores are acceptable for internal identifiers (CSS classes, file names) but not for public URLs.
How long should a URL slug be?
Aim for 3-5 words (roughly 30-60 characters). Google truncates URLs in search results at around 60-75 characters. Shorter slugs are easier to share, read, and remember. Long slugs with stop words add noise without SEO value.
Should I remove stop words from my slug?
It depends. Removing "the," "a," "of" shortens the slug without losing meaning. But "how-to" and "what-is" are search-intent signals that users type into Google. A common approach is to keep "how," "what," "why" but remove "the," "a," "of."
How does the tool handle accented characters?
By default, non-ASCII characters are stripped. So a word with an accented e becomes the same word without that e. This is the safe choice for legacy systems. For modern systems that support UTF-8 URLs, disable ASCII stripping and the accented character stays in the slug. For transliteration, use a dedicated slugify library.
What characters are allowed in a URL slug?
Per RFC 3986, unreserved characters in a URL are A-Z, a-z, 0-9, hyphen, period, underscore, and tilde. In practice, slugs use only lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens. Dots are sometimes used for version numbers (v2.0-release) but can confuse some systems. Underscores are valid but not recommended for SEO.
Is my title uploaded anywhere?
No. Slug generation happens entirely in your browser. Your titles never leave your device.
Last updated: September 9, 2026 · Author: HT99 Tools Editorial Team