How this works in your browser
The text is lowercased, accented characters are decomposed and their diacritics removed to leave the base ASCII letter, then anything that is not a letter or digit becomes the separator, with runs of separators collapsed and any leading or trailing ones trimmed. The decomposition step is what turns an accented e into a plain one rather than deleting it, preserving the word rather than mangling it. Stripping to ASCII is deliberate: accented characters are legal in URLs but get percent-encoded into unreadable sequences when copied and pasted, which defeats the purpose of a human-readable slug.
Who uses URL Slug Generator
Blog and article URLs
Turn a headline into a clean, readable web address.
Product and category pages
Generate consistent slugs across a catalogue.
File naming
Produce safe filenames with no spaces or special characters.
Database keys and identifiers
Create predictable string keys from human-readable names.
Frequently asked questions
What happens to accented characters?
Accents and diacritics are stripped (e.g. cafe with an accent becomes cafe) since standard URL slugs use plain ASCII letters.
Can I choose underscores instead of hyphens?
Yes, select your preferred separator - hyphens are the more common convention for SEO-friendly URLs.
What happens to numbers and symbols?
Numbers are preserved; other symbols and punctuation are replaced with the separator, and repeated separators are collapsed into one.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens, for anything web-facing. Google has stated it treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners, so an underscore slug can read as one long token rather than separate words. Underscores remain reasonable for database keys and filenames where search engines are not involved.
How long should a slug be?
Long enough to be meaningful, short enough to read. Three to five significant words is a good target. Dropping filler words like 'the' and 'a' shortens it without losing sense, and a slug that carries the main terms is more useful to a reader scanning a URL than a full sentence would be.
Should I change a slug on an existing page?
Only with a redirect in place. Changing a published URL breaks every existing link to it and discards whatever ranking that URL had accumulated. If it must change, put a permanent redirect from the old address to the new one.
Why are accents removed rather than kept?
Because plain ASCII slugs are unambiguous everywhere. Accented characters in URLs get percent-encoded into long unreadable sequences when copied, and some older systems handle them badly. Stripping to the base letter keeps the URL readable and shareable.