Slug Generator

DEVELOPER PERMALINK SEO SLUG URL

About this tool

Convert any title or phrase into a clean URL slug — for SEO, CMS and development.

Convert any title or phrase into a clean URL slug instantly. SEO-friendly, with stop word removal, accent transliteration, and bulk mode. Free, no signup.

RT-SEO-002 · SEO & Marketing

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Lowercase Remove stop words Remove special characters Transliterate accents (ä→a, ñ→n, é→e…)

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characters (leave empty for no limit)

Generated slug

SEO Preview

recatools.com/your-slug/

Bulk mode — paste multiple titles (one per line)

How to Use the Slug Generator

Type or paste your page title

Enter any title, heading, or phrase — the slug generates instantly as you type. Works with article titles, product names, category labels, or any text you need to turn into a URL path.

Choose separator and options

Hyphen is recommended by Google for SEO; enable stop word removal for cleaner slugs. Turn on accent transliteration if your title contains characters like ä, ñ, or é that need to be romanised.

Check the SEO preview

The preview box shows exactly how the URL will look in a browser address bar — so you can confirm it looks clean, readable, and professional before using it in your CMS.

Enable Bulk mode for multiple titles

Toggle Bulk mode on and paste a list of titles — one per line. All slugs are generated instantly and appear in the output field, ready to copy and paste into your spreadsheet or CMS.

URL Slugs and SEO — Why Your URL Structure Still Matters in 2026

What Makes a Good URL Slug for SEO

The URL slug is one of those SEO signals that many marketers dismiss as minor — and they're right that it's a small direct ranking factor. But its indirect impact on click-through rate (CTR) is significant. Descriptive, readable URLs consistently outperform ID-based URLs in search snippets because users can tell at a glance what a page is about before they click. A URL like recatools.com/slug-generator/ signals relevance immediately; recatools.com/?p=4281 tells the user nothing.

For best results: keep slugs under 60 characters for the path segment, use hyphens not underscores (Google confirmed that hyphens act as word separators while underscores join words together as one token), include your primary keyword near the front, and use lowercase throughout. Avoid including dates unless the content is genuinely time-sensitive, as date-based URLs age poorly and require 301 redirects when you eventually want to refresh the content. Canonical URL consistency matters too — always pick one URL format (with or without trailing slash) and stick to it across your entire site.

One nuance worth knowing: stop words are generally safe to remove from slugs because Google ignores them in keyword matching anyway. However, there are exceptions — "how-to" should keep its structure, brand names containing articles should be preserved, and sometimes a stop word genuinely changes meaning (contrast "a-frame-cabin" vs "frame-cabin"). This tool gives you full control over stop word removal so you can make the call for each slug.

"Google's John Mueller confirmed: hyphens separate words in URLs; underscores join them. 'new_york' is treated as one word 'newyork'; 'new-york' is treated as two words."

Stop Words in URLs: When to Remove, When to Keep

Stop words are the small, common function words of a language — "the", "a", "an", "in", "of", "on", "at", "for", "with", "by" and so on. Search engines filter these out when processing keyword queries, which is why including them in a URL adds length without adding ranking value. The slug "best-restaurants-singapore" and "the-best-restaurants-in-singapore" communicate the same meaning to Google's indexer, but the second version is 20 characters longer and looks less clean in a browser bar.

That said, context matters. The phrase "how-to" is technically two stop words (how + to) but removing them would break the meaning of a how-to guide URL entirely. Brand names that contain articles — "A-Team", "A-Frame" — must be preserved. And occasionally the stop word itself is the keyword: a page specifically about the article "A" in English grammar needs to keep it. Use your judgment and this tool's instant preview to test before committing to a slug.

Multilingual Slugs: Handling ASEAN Languages in URLs

Unicode slugs are technically valid under RFC 3986, but browsers percent-encode non-ASCII characters for transmission — so a Chinese title like 美食 becomes %E7%BE%8E%E9%A3%9F in the URL bar, which is unreadable and impossible to share reliably. For ASEAN content creators, the practical best practice is to transliterate or romanise titles before creating slugs.

Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu are particularly well-suited to slug creation because they use the standard Roman alphabet with consistent phonetics — a title like "Cara Membuat Nasi Lemak" becomes "cara-membuat-nasi-lemak" without any transliteration step. Singapore's own government portals (gov.sg) use English-language slugs even for bilingual and Malay-language content — a deliberate choice to maximise URL shareability and consistency across language versions of the same page.

Chinese requires pinyin transliteration (美食 → mei-shi), Thai script requires romanisation (กรุงเทพ → krung-thep), and Vietnamese diacritics are best stripped or transliterated for slug use (Hà Nội → ha-noi). This tool's accent transliteration mode handles common Western European accents; for ASEAN scripts, romanise the text first before generating the slug. The result will be a clean, shareable, SEO-friendly URL that works across every browser and link-sharing platform in the region.

10 Facts About URL Slugs and SEO

Google confirmed that hyphens (-) act as word separators in URLs, while underscores (_) do not — making "best-restaurants" rank for both "best" and "restaurants" separately.

URL length does not directly affect Google rankings — but shorter, descriptive URLs improve click-through rate because they're more readable in search results and social shares.

Changing a URL on a live site causes a temporary ranking drop — even with a 301 redirect, Google takes time to transfer all ranking signals to the new URL.

Google's John Mueller stated that stop words in URLs are ignored for ranking — but they do make URLs longer without adding any SEO value.

WordPress's permalink structure defaults to post ID URLs (/p=123) — switching to a slug-based structure (/post-name) improves both SEO and user experience significantly.

Singapore's government websites (gov.sg) use English slugs even for Malay and Chinese content — a deliberate multilingual accessibility and consistency decision.

The first URL ever, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, was http://info.cern.ch — it had no slug, only a domain. Slug-based URLs came later with the rise of CMS platforms.

Percent-encoding transforms spaces into %20, Chinese characters into three %XX codes each, making unicode characters technically valid but impractical and unreadable in slugs.

Indonesian and Malay are phonetically consistent languages — converting titles to URL slugs is straightforward as the romanised alphabet maps 1:1 to the spoken language with no special encoding needed.

Google recommends keeping URLs under 2,048 characters (browser limit) — but for SEO best practice, under 60 characters for the path is the practical ideal.

Frequently Asked Questions

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. In the URL recatools.com/slug-generator/, the slug is slug-generator. Good slugs are short, lowercase, use hyphens as separators, and include the page's primary keyword. They appear in browser address bars, search results, and shared links — making them important for both SEO and user experience.
Always use hyphens. Google's John Mueller confirmed that hyphens act as word separators in URLs — so "best-restaurants" is indexed as two separate words "best" and "restaurants". Underscores join words, so "best_restaurants" is indexed as one token "bestrestaurants". For maximum SEO benefit, stick with hyphens. Most CMS platforms (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow) default to hyphens for this reason.
URL is a confirmed but minor direct ranking factor. Its bigger impact is indirect: descriptive URLs improve click-through rate in search results (users can tell what the page is about before clicking), and clean URLs are easier to earn backlinks for because people are more willing to share them. Content quality, backlinks, and Core Web Vitals still dominate, but a good slug is a cost-free SEO improvement you should always make.
Stop words are common function words (the, a, an, in, of, on, at, for, with, by…) that Google filters out in keyword matching. Removing them from slugs shortens the URL without losing meaning — "best-restaurants-singapore" is cleaner than "the-best-restaurants-in-singapore". However, keep stop words when they change meaning: "how-to" guides need their structure, and brand names containing articles should be preserved. This tool lets you toggle stop word removal on or off.
Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia use the standard Roman alphabet, so they generate clean slugs directly — just paste your Malay or Indonesian title and the tool handles it. For example, "Cara Membuat Nasi Lemak" becomes "cara-membuat-nasi-lemak" with no extra steps. If you write for a bilingual audience, consider whether an English-language slug (like gov.sg uses) might serve your SEO better, since English search queries typically have higher search volume globally.
Changing a URL causes a temporary ranking drop — even with a 301 redirect in place. Google takes time to discover the redirect, crawl the new URL, and transfer ranking signals. Expect 2–8 weeks for full recovery. Always implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, update internal links, resubmit the new URL in Google Search Console, and monitor rankings closely. Avoid changing URLs unless you have a strong SEO reason to do so.
Google recommends keeping full URLs under 2,048 characters (the browser maximum), but the practical SEO best practice is to keep the path segment — the slug — under 60 characters. Shorter slugs are fully visible in search result snippets without being truncated, easier to read in social media shares, and simpler to type manually. Remove stop words and keep only the essential keywords for best results.
Only include dates when the content is genuinely time-sensitive and meant to expire — news articles, event listings, or annual reports. For evergreen content (how-to guides, tool pages, reference articles), avoid dates entirely. Date-based URLs age poorly: readers see "2021" in a URL and assume the content is outdated, reducing CTR. When you eventually update the content, you'll need a 301 redirect which temporarily hurts rankings. Timeless slugs are almost always the better choice.
Yes, with some notes. For Roman-alphabet languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Malay, Indonesian, Vietnamese with diacritics), enable the "Transliterate accents" option to convert characters like é, ñ, ü, and ç to their Roman equivalents. For non-Roman scripts (Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Korean), romanise or transliterate the text first before pasting it into this tool. The stop word removal list is English-only, so disable it when processing non-English titles.
A canonical URL is the definitive, preferred version of a page's URL — the one you tell Google to index when multiple URLs might serve the same content. Slugs are a key part of canonical URL design because an inconsistently named slug (with/without trailing slash, different capitalisation, with/without www) can create duplicate content issues. Always generate your slug once, set the canonical tag to that exact URL, use it consistently in internal links, and never change it without implementing a 301 redirect.

Slug Generator