Should slugs include stop words like "the" and "a"?

It's a stylistic choice, not a technical requirement — this tool keeps every word by default since removing stop words is a judgment call some publishers make for shorter, cleaner URLs and others skip because it can occasionally change a slug's meaning. If your CMS or SEO guidelines specify removing them, manually trim the output.

Why does the tool convert accented letters instead of keeping them?

Plain-ASCII slugs are the more portable, broadly-compatible convention, avoiding encoding issues in older systems and making raw URLs easier to read and type. Modern URLs do support Unicode directly, so keeping native accented or non-Latin characters is also a legitimate choice some sites make — this tool defaults to the ASCII-transliteration convention rather than Unicode-preserving.

Does this tool check if the slug is already taken on my site?

No — it only generates the slug text from your title; it has no way to know what URLs already exist on your specific site or CMS. Check for conflicts in your own platform before publishing.

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Text to Slug Converter

Turns any title into a clean, URL-safe slug — lowercased, hyphenated, and accent-stripped.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or paste here is ever sent to a server — see how the calculations work.

A "slug" is the URL-friendly version of a page title — the part after the domain in a web address, like the "text-to-slug-converter" in this very page's URL. This tool converts any text into a valid slug automatically: lowercasing it, replacing spaces and punctuation with hyphens, and stripping characters that aren't safe or conventional in a URL.

Bloggers, CMS users, and developers naming new pages all run into the same small but repetitive task — turning "My Great Article Title!" into "my-great-article-title" — and most CMS platforms do this automatically but not always in a way you can preview or adjust before publishing.

The generated slug appears here as you type.

The actual slug-generation rules

Every letter is lowercased first, since URLs are conventionally treated as case-insensitive by search engines and most web servers, and mixed-case URLs are a common source of accidental duplicate-content issues (the same page reachable at two differently-cased URLs).

Whitespace and most punctuation are replaced with a single hyphen, with consecutive hyphens collapsed into one so you never get "my--title" from a title that had multiple spaces or punctuation marks in a row. Leading and trailing hyphens are trimmed.

Accented and non-ASCII Latin characters are transliterated to their closest plain-ASCII equivalent ("café" becomes "cafe", "naïve" becomes "naive") rather than being dropped outright or percent-encoded, because plain ASCII slugs are more portable, more readable in a raw URL, and avoid encoding-related bugs in some older systems, even though modern URLs technically support Unicode characters directly.

Reserved URL characters (like "?", "#", "&", "/") are stripped rather than encoded, since a slug is meant to be a single clean path segment, not a full query string.

Who uses this

Generating a clean URL slug for a new blog post or page title before publishing.
Checking what slug a CMS will likely generate automatically, to preview and adjust it if it's too long or awkward.
Converting a list of titles in bulk (paste one per line) into a matching list of slugs for a spreadsheet or migration script.

Edge cases to know about

Non-Latin scripts (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.) don't have a straightforward ASCII transliteration the way accented Latin letters do — the tool will strip characters it can't meaningfully transliterate, which can produce a much shorter slug than expected for non-English titles. For SEO purposes on non-English sites, some publishers deliberately keep native-script slugs instead (which modern browsers and search engines handle fine); this tool's ASCII-only approach is a stylistic choice, not the only valid option.
Numbers are preserved as-is, but a slug that's entirely numeric (like a converted date or product code) is technically valid but can be visually indistinguishable from a database ID in the URL — worth a second look if that's a concern.
Very long titles produce very long slugs; the tool doesn't automatically truncate, since the ideal slug length depends on your platform's own conventions and SEO preferences, not a universal rule.

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FAQ

Should slugs include stop words like "the" and "a"?: It's a stylistic choice, not a technical requirement — this tool keeps every word by default since removing stop words is a judgment call some publishers make for shorter, cleaner URLs and others skip because it can occasionally change a slug's meaning. If your CMS or SEO guidelines specify removing them, manually trim the output.
Why does the tool convert accented letters instead of keeping them?: Plain-ASCII slugs are the more portable, broadly-compatible convention, avoiding encoding issues in older systems and making raw URLs easier to read and type. Modern URLs do support Unicode directly, so keeping native accented or non-Latin characters is also a legitimate choice some sites make — this tool defaults to the ASCII-transliteration convention rather than Unicode-preserving.
Does this tool check if the slug is already taken on my site?: No — it only generates the slug text from your title; it has no way to know what URLs already exist on your specific site or CMS. Check for conflicts in your own platform before publishing.