URL Slug Generator

Hyphens. Google has said for years that it treats a hyphen as a word separator but reads an underscore as part of the word, so /red-shoes matches a search for "red shoes" while /red_shoes is closer to one word, "red_shoes". Hyphens are also easier to see in an underlined link. Use underscores only when you're matching an existing convention, such as a file name or a Python-style identifier.

It's optional, and it mostly buys you a shorter URL. Search engines ignore most stopwords anyway, so /best-recipes-paris and /the-best-recipes-in-paris rank about the same. The one thing to watch is meaning: "how to fix" and "not found" read differently without "to" or "not", which is why this tool keeps question words and negations even with stopword removal switched on.

Accented Latin letters are decomposed and the accent dropped, so café becomes cafe and Straße becomes strasse; a handful of letters with no decomposition (ø, æ, đ, ł) are spelled out. Letters from other scripts — Devanagari, Arabic, Chinese — have no ASCII equivalent and are removed, and the tool tells you when that happens. Native-script slugs are valid (browsers show them, and they're percent-encoded when copied), so if your audience reads that script you may prefer to keep the original title instead.

There's no hard limit — browsers and Google both handle URLs of thousands of characters — but 3 to 6 meaningful words is the sweet spot. Long slugs get cut off in search results and are hard to read when shared, and stuffing extra keywords into them doesn't help ranking. The max-length option cuts on a word boundary so you never end up with a half-word at the end.

You can, but every change needs a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, or you'll lose the links and rankings the old address had built up. Get the slug right before you publish; afterwards, only change it when the page's topic has genuinely changed, and set up the redirect at the same time.