Free URL Slug Generator That Handles Accents, Symbols and Stop Words

How to Use This Tool

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL — the how-much-is-20-off in example.com/how-much-is-20-off. Getting it right matters more than it looks, because a URL is the one part of a page you cannot casually change later without breaking every link to it.

How a title becomes a slug

Five steps, and one of them is usually skipped:

1. Normalise to NFD. Unicode can store é either as a single character or as e plus a combining acute accent. NFD forces the second form.
2. Strip combining marks. Now the accents are separate characters, removing them leaves the plain Latin letter behind. This handles the great majority of European text in one line.
3. Map what is left. A handful of letters carry no combining mark to strip — ß ø ð þ æ Đ and a few others. NFD cannot decompose them, so they need an explicit table or they disappear entirely. This is why so many slugifiers turn Straße into stra-e.
4. Replace everything else. Anything outside a–z and 0–9 becomes the separator.
5. Collapse and trim. Squash runs of separators into one and remove them from the ends.

The stop-word question

Removing a, the, of, and, for makes slugs shorter and denser. It is a real trade-off rather than an improvement. Shorter URLs display better in search results and are easier to share, but stop words sometimes carry meaning: state-of-the-art and state-art do not read the same, and how-to-cook loses its shape as cook.

Google has said for years that it does not weight keywords in URLs heavily, so the SEO argument for stripping them is weak. Leave it off unless a slug is genuinely unwieldy.

Length

There is no technical limit worth worrying about, but URLs are truncated in search results at roughly 60–70 characters on desktop and less on mobile. The tool warns past 60. Beyond about 100 you are producing something nobody will ever read or paste correctly.

Non-Latin scripts

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and Cyrillic cannot be transliterated by stripping marks, because there is nothing to strip — a proper transliteration needs a dictionary, and for Chinese it needs to know the reading of each character in context. This tool does not pretend otherwise. It flags those characters and leaves you two honest options: keep them as percent-encoded UTF-8, which every modern browser displays correctly, or write the slug in English yourself. Percent-encoding is fine for search engines and ugly when copied as plain text; a hand-written English slug is the more durable choice.

Duplicates

Two different titles very often produce the same slug once punctuation is removed. In bulk mode the tool marks collisions, because the alternative is discovering them when your CMS silently appends -2 to something you wanted to keep clean.