Text to Slug Converter
Frequently asked questions
What is a slug and how is it different from a page title?
The title is written for a reader and can be any length, with commas, colons and capital letters. The slug is the part of the address after the domain, and it lives by technical rules: lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces, no punctuation. One heading gives one address, but they are never the same string.
How long should a slug be?
A good target is three to five meaningful words. best-espresso-machines reads better than best-espresso-machines-for-home-use-in-2026-cheap. There is no hard limit, but a long address gets cut off in the search snippet and in messengers, and what the reader sees is a broken tail rather than the page topic.
Hyphen or underscore?
A hyphen is Google's direct recommendation for URL structure. A hyphen is read as a word boundary, an underscore is not, so buy_sofa can be read as a single word.
Should the address be all lowercase?
Yes, and it is safer than it looks. The domain is case-insensitive, but the path after it is not on most servers: /About and /about can resolve to two different pages, or one of them can answer with a 404. Lowercase everywhere removes the question entirely.
What happens to accented letters and non-Latin alphabets?
Accented Latin. Characters like é, ü and ñ are folded to the nearest plain letter, so résumé turns into resume and the address stays inside ASCII. Other alphabets. Cyrillic, Greek and similar scripts are transliterated letter by letter rather than translated: the word keeps its sound, not its meaning. Emoji and symbols. They carry no letter equivalent at all, so they simply drop out of the string.
Should stop words like "the" and "of" stay in the address?
Usually they are dropped: the-best-of-the-coffee-shops-in-london says no more than best-coffee-shops-london and takes twice the space. Keep a stop word only when removing it changes the meaning, as in what-is-a-slug, where the question is the topic of the page.
Where else is a clean string needed besides site addresses?
In file names – spaces and apostrophes break links on upload and when moving files between systems. In code and databases – table, field and variable names are written in plain Latin so they do not depend on the encoding. In email campaigns and ad platforms – a link with encoded characters is pasted wrongly more often than a readable one.
Can a slug be turned back into the original heading?
The tool works one way only. Restoring the source is ambiguous: from new-york-city-guide there is no way to tell whether the heading was "New York City Guide" or "New York: a city guide", because the punctuation and the capitals were dropped on the way.
Should the year or a date go into the address?
Only if the page is genuinely tied to that year and will be replaced by a new one. In an article that gets updated every season, best-laptops-2026 turns into a promise the page stops keeping, and the address then has to be changed together with the content – which is exactly the work worth avoiding.
Does a slug affect a site's rankings?
The address is a weak factor compared with content and links. A readable URL helps indirectly: it looks clearer in the results and gets copied more willingly.
Is it worth changing addresses on a site that already works?
To a search engine it is a new page. If the old URL is already bringing in traffic, there is no need to redo it for looks. When a change is necessary, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old address.
The tool turns a heading or a phrase into a page address with no spaces, no punctuation and no characters a URL cannot carry. Paste a line into the "Content" field, press "Convert", copy the result.
How to make a slug online
- Paste the text into the "Content" field. A word, a name, a phrase or an article title all work. There is no need to fix the case or strip punctuation beforehand.
- Press "Convert". Spaces and service characters are brought to a form suitable for a URL, and letters outside the plain Latin set are transliterated character by character.
- Copy the result. The ready string can go into the address field in a CMS, into a file name or into a document. The "Reset" button clears the form.
What happens to punctuation and accents in an address
A URL is safe ground for a narrow set of characters: Latin letters, digits, a hyphen and a handful of service symbols. Everything else is either dropped or rewritten as percent-encoding, which is why a title like "Women's Day: Before & After" cannot go into an address the way it is written.
| In the title | In the address | Example | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space | hyphen | Best Coffee Shops – best-coffee-shops | a space becomes %20 and breaks the line in two |
| & and other symbols | spelled out or dropped | Coffee & Tea – coffee-and-tea | an ampersand separates query parameters |
| Apostrophe, quotes, colon | dropped | Women's Day – womens-day | encoded as %27 the address stops being readable |
| Accented letters é, ñ, ü | plain Latin | Café Culture – cafe-culture | keeps the address inside ASCII |
| Slash, question mark, hash | dropped | Before/After – before-after | each of them already has its own job in a URL |
| Capital letters | lowercase | New York – new-york | some servers treat About and about as two pages |
The point that follows is simple: a slug is neither a translation nor a headline, it is a short technical string. Two addresses that differ only in case or only in a trailing slash can be counted as two separate pages, so the format is worth settling once and keeping to it across the site.
What the tool does not do, and what to pair it with
The form is one field and one button: there is no choice of separator or case, and an address is not turned back into the original heading. If characters that need encoding remain in the address, use the URL converter; for internationalised domains such as "münchen.de" use the Punycode converter. To bring a heading to the right case, use the case converter, and to strip extra spaces and HTML tags, use the text cleaner.