Understanding URL slugs
A title, made URL-safe.
A slug is the readable, URL-safe trailing piece of a link. The conventions are small but worth getting right.
What a slug is.
The slug is the last segment of a URL path: in /blog/why-i-stopped-using-uuid-v4, the slug is why-i-stopped-using-uuid-v4. It's human-readable, lowercase, hyphenated, no punctuation beyond hyphens. The shape exists for SEO, link clarity, and avoiding URL-encoding noise.
"My Article Title!" → my-article-title
The transformation rules.
Lowercase everything. Strip accents (café → cafe). Replace runs of whitespace and punctuation with a single hyphen. Drop characters that aren't a-z, 0-9, or hyphen. Trim leading and trailing hyphens. The result is always URL-safe and never needs percent-encoding.
Length and stop words.
Long slugs read worse than short ones and break in the middle when shared. Aim for under 60 characters. Some slug generators strip articles and prepositions (the, a, of); this tool keeps them by default because aggressive stop-word removal changes meaning more than it saves space. Trim manually if a particular title needs it.
Stability matters.
Once a slug is published, changing it breaks every link that points at it. Best practice: pick a slug at publication, save it as a stable database column, and serve a 301 redirect from any old slugs to the canonical one if you ever do edit it. Search engines also dislike slug changes — they cost link equity and rankings.
Non-Latin scripts.
For Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other non-Latin titles, you have two reasonable choices: transliterate to Latin (Russian "Привет" → "privet"), which loses meaning but stays URL-safe; or keep the native script and rely on RFC 3987 IRIs, which most modern browsers handle. This generator transliterates by default; native-script slugs need a bespoke solution.