Text to Slug

Turn any headline or title into a clean URL slug with this free text to slug converter. It lowercases your text, strips accents and punctuation, and swaps spaces for hyphens (or underscores) — then copy the result straight into WordPress, Shopify or any CMS.

How to Use the Text to Slug Tool

Paste or type your headline into the text box — a blog title, product name, video title, anything. The slug appears instantly below as you type, with a character count and word count to keep it tight. When it looks right, press Copy Slug and paste it into your CMS's URL or "permalink" field.

Three options control the output. The word separator defaults to the hyphen, which Google recommends because it treats hyphens as word boundaries; switch to underscore only if a legacy system demands it. Lowercase keeps every letter small, since mixed-case URLs cause duplicate-content headaches on case-sensitive servers. Strip accents converts characters like é, ñ and ü to plain ASCII — otherwise they get percent-encoded into unreadable strings like caf%C3%A9 that look broken when shared.

How Slug Generation Works

A slug is just your title run through a strict cleanup pipeline, and this tool applies the same steps every CMS uses under the hood:

First, Unicode normalization decomposes accented characters into a base letter plus a combining mark (é becomes e + ´), and the strip-accents step deletes the marks, leaving plain e. Lowercasing follows, because Example.com/Page and example.com/page are technically different URLs on many servers. Then every run of characters that is not a letter, digit or space — punctuation, brackets, emojis, currency symbols — is replaced with the separator, whitespace collapses into separators, repeats merge into one, and any leading or trailing separators are trimmed. What survives is guaranteed URL-safe without any percent-encoding.

Worked Example

Take the headline "10 Best Coffee Makers of 2026 (Reviewed!)" and watch the pipeline:

Eight words, 39 characters, zero unsafe characters — paste it after your domain and you have a link that survives email clients, social previews and search results intact. Try unchecking "Strip accents" with a word like "café" to see the difference it makes: the é survives and would be encoded as caf%C3%A9 by browsers.

Slug SEO Best Practices: What Most Generators Don't Tell You

Generating the slug is the easy part; writing a good one is where most people leave SEO value on the table. Keep the slug short — 3 to 5 meaningful words — and front-load your target keyword, since URLs get truncated in search results and users scan the first words. Strip stop words ("and", "the", "of", "a") unless removing them changes the meaning: "best-coffee-makers-2026" beats "the-10-best-coffee-makers-of-2026" in every share preview.

The last row matters most: once a URL is indexed or shared, changing the slug breaks every existing link. Pick the slug deliberately at publish time — that is exactly what this tool is for — and if you must change one later, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL so link equity and visitors follow.

Limitations

This tool generates the slug mechanically; it does not write it for you. It will not remove stop words, shorten an overlong headline, or pick which keywords matter — those editorial calls still need a human. Non-Latin scripts (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic) are stripped rather than transliterated, so headlines in those languages produce short or empty slugs; romanize the title first for best results.

The copy button uses the browser clipboard API, which requires a secure (HTTPS) context — on plain HTTP it falls back to a manual select-and-copy message. Generated slugs are not checked against your site for duplicates; if two posts produce the same slug, your CMS will typically append a number, so verify uniqueness before publishing.

A clean slug is invisible craft; so is a clean subtitle file. The Subtitle Editor fixes timings and text in SRT and VTT files with the same philosophy — small, exact, and done in the browser without an upload.

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