How to Turn a Title into a Clean URL Slug

To make a URL slug, paste your title into the Slug Generator — it lowercases the text, strips accents, spells out "&" as "and," drops punctuation, and joins the words with hyphens (or underscores or dots), one slug per line, all in your browser.

What a URL slug is and why it matters

A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page — in toolsfornerds.com/blog/how-to-make-a-url-slug/, the slug is how-to-make-a-url-slug. Search engines and readers both parse it, so a clean slug (lowercase, hyphenated, no stray punctuation or accented characters) is easier to read, share and rank than a URL built straight from a title with capital letters, apostrophes and ampersands left in.

How to make a slug with Toolbench

1. Open the Slug Generator.
2. Paste one or more titles into the Titles box, one per line.
3. Slugs appear instantly in the panel on the right, each one paired with its original title above it.
4. Pick a separator: hyphen -, underscore _, or dot .. Hyphen is the default and the one search engines expect.
5. Turn on Drop stop words if you want common words like "the" and "and" removed from the slug.
6. Click any row to copy that slug, click Copy to copy them all (one per line), or use Send to → to send the list to another tool.

What the conversion actually does

Step	What happens
Normalize	Accented letters are converted to their plain form (café → cafe)
Lowercase	Every character is lowercased
Expand &	Ampersands become the word "and"
Strip apostrophes	' and ’ are removed, not replaced with a hyphen (don't → dont)
Split on everything else	Any run of characters that isn't a letter or digit becomes a word boundary
Stop words (optional)	If on, common words are removed — but only if at least one word would still be left
Join	The remaining words are joined with your chosen separator

The stop-word list is: a, an, the, and, or, of, to, in, on, for, with, at, by, from, is, are.

Example: a title with an accent and an ampersand

Input:

10 Tips for Café Owners & Baristas

Output, default settings (hyphen, stop words off):

10-tips-for-cafe-owners-and-baristas

Here's what happened: é lost its accent and became e, & turned into "and," everything was lowercased, and the words were joined with hyphens. The number 10 is kept as-is since digits count as word characters.

With "Drop stop words" turned on, "for" and "and" are removed (both are on the stop-word list):

10-tips-cafe-owners-baristas

Paste several titles at once and you get one slug per line, so you can batch-convert a list of blog post titles or product names in one pass.

Tips and common mistakes

• Hyphens, not underscores, for web URLs. Hyphens are what Google recommends and what most CMSs expect; reach for underscore or dot only if a specific system requires it.
• A line of only punctuation or emoji produces no slug. If nothing alphanumeric survives the split, that row shows — instead of an empty string.
• "Drop stop words" won't empty out a title that's nothing but stop words. If removing them would leave zero words, the tool keeps the original words instead of giving you a blank slug.
• Apostrophes disappear, they don't become hyphens. Trader Joe's becomes trader-joes, not trader-joe-s — keep that in mind if you're matching an existing URL scheme.
• Batch-convert before you publish, not after — changing a slug on a page that's already indexed means setting up a redirect.

Related tools

• Text Cleaner — strip HTML, smart quotes and extra spaces from a title before you slugify it.
• Case Converter — convert text to kebab-case, snake_case or other cases for things that aren't URLs.
• Word Counter — check a title's length before you commit it to a slug.

Frequently asked questions

Does a URL slug need to match the page title exactly?

No. A slug should be short, descriptive and keyword-relevant, but it doesn't need every word from the title — many sites intentionally drop stop words like "a," "the" and "and" to keep slugs shorter.

Will accented or non-English characters work in a slug?

Yes. The generator strips accents and diacritics so café becomes cafe and naïve becomes naive, keeping the slug plain ASCII, which is the safest format for URLs.

What happens to numbers in a title?

Numbers are treated like letters and kept in the slug as-is — "10 Tips" becomes 10-tips, not spelled out or removed.

Is my text sent to a server when I generate slugs?

No. Slugs are generated in your browser as you type. If you're signed in, your input syncs privately to your account; if you're signed out, nothing is saved anywhere.

Can I convert a whole list of titles at once?

Yes. Paste multiple titles, one per line, and the tool produces one slug per line in the same order, ready to copy as a batch.