Turn any title into a clean URL slug. Strips accents, chooses a separator, controls case and length, optionally removes stop words and keeps Unicode.
Turn a title into a clean, URL-safe slug. Accents are folded to plain ASCII, punctuation is dropped and words are joined by the separator you pick. Use the options to control case, trim a maximum length or strip common stop words.
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page: the how-to-cache-resumes-in-redis in /blog/how-to-cache-resumes-in-redis. It replaces an opaque numeric ID with something a person can read, remember and evaluate before clicking. Search engines display the URL in results, so a descriptive slug both reassures readers and reinforces the topic of the page.
Keep to lowercase ASCII letters, digits and a single separator. This avoids three separate classes of problem: URLs are case-sensitive in their path on most servers, so /About and /about are different resources and a mixed-case slug invites duplicate-content errors. Percent encoding makes any non-ASCII character three times longer and much harder to read when copied into plain text. And spaces are simply not allowed, becoming %20 or +.
Hyphens are the conventional separator. Google has stated for years that it treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners, meaning cache_redis may be read as a single token while cache-redis is clearly two words. Unless you have a specific reason, choose the hyphen.
By default this tool folds accented characters to their closest ASCII equivalent: é becomes e, ß becomes ss, ł becomes l. It does this by decomposing the text with Unicode NFD normalisation and dropping the combining marks, plus a lookup table for the ligatures and special letters that decomposition does not handle.
Keeping Unicode is a legitimate alternative. Internationalised URLs work in every modern browser and are far more readable to a reader of that language — a Chinese or Russian slug transliterated to ASCII is usually meaningless. The cost is that the raw URL contains percent-encoded bytes, which look alarming when pasted into an email or a terminal, and some older tools still mangle them. Enable Keep Unicode letters if your audience reads the script; leave it off if the slug has to survive arbitrary systems.
There is no technical limit worth worrying about, but slugs beyond roughly 60 characters get truncated in search results and become awkward to share. Trimming is best done on a word boundary rather than mid-word, which is what the length option does here.
Removing stop words — the, a, of, and — shortens a slug without losing much meaning. It is a stylistic choice rather than a ranking factor; modern search engines are perfectly capable of ignoring them. Be careful with titles where a stop word carries meaning, since stripping them from "The Who" or "To Be or Not to Be" destroys the phrase.
Once a slug is published and linked, changing it breaks every inbound link unless you add a redirect. A slightly imperfect slug that has been live for a year is almost always better than a cleaner one that costs you your backlinks. Decide the format before launch, then leave it alone.