A slug generator online converts any title, heading, or phrase into a clean, URL-friendly slug by removing accents, stripping special characters, and replacing spaces with hyphens - in one click.
What is a URL Slug?
A URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page in a human-readable way. For example, in the URL https://example.com/blog/how-to-use-regex, the slug is how-to-use-regex.
Good slugs are:
- Lowercase - URLs are case-sensitive; lowercase is standard
- Hyphen-separated - spaces become hyphens (
-), not underscores - Free of special characters - no
?,&,#,%, or punctuation - Accent-free -
ábecomesa,ñbecomesn,çbecomesc - Concise - shorter slugs are easier to share and remember
How to Use the Slug Generator
- Open the Slug Generator on UtilWave.
- Type or paste a title or phrase into the input field.
- The slug is generated instantly below.
- Choose between hyphen (
-) or underscore (_) as the separator. - Click Copy to grab the slug.
Slug Examples
| Title | Generated Slug |
|---|---|
| How to Use Regex | how-to-use-regex |
| Café au Lait Recipe | cafe-au-lait-recipe |
| Top 10 Dev Tools (2026) | top-10-dev-tools-2026 |
| C++ vs Rust: Which is Faster? | c-vs-rust-which-is-faster |
| Ação Social - Rio de Janeiro | acao-social-rio-de-janeiro |
Why Slugs Matter for SEO
Search engines use URL structure as a ranking signal. A descriptive, keyword-rich slug like /best-javascript-frameworks-2026 performs better than /post?id=1234 because:
- Keywords in the URL reinforce the page topic
- Clean URLs are more likely to be shared and linked to
- Users can infer page content from the URL alone before clicking
- Google's guidelines recommend descriptive, hyphen-separated URLs
When Do Developers Need Slugs?
- CMS / blog platforms - WordPress, Ghost, and headless CMS generate slugs from post titles
- Routing in web apps -
/products/blue-running-shoesinstead of/products/42 - File system naming - consistent, accent-free file names for static assets
- Database keys - human-readable identifiers alongside numeric IDs
FAQ
Should I use hyphens or underscores? Google has historically treated hyphens as word separators (like spaces), while underscores join words. Use hyphens for maximum SEO compatibility.
What happens to numbers in the title?
Numbers are kept as-is. "Top 10 Tips" becomes top-10-tips.
Are emojis supported? Emojis are removed from slugs since they are not safe for URLs without encoding.
Should I keep stop words like "the", "and", "a"?
It depends. For SEO, many guides recommend removing short stop words to keep slugs concise (how-install-node vs how-to-install-node). Either approach is acceptable.
Generate clean slugs instantly with the free Slug Generator.