Convert any title or phrase into a clean, URL-friendly slug instantly — lowercase, hyphenated, no special characters.
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page. In toolbrainy.com/text-to-slug-convert-text-to-url-slug-online-free/, the slug is everything after the domain — text-to-slug-convert-text-to-url-slug-online-free. Good slugs are short, lowercase, hyphen-separated, and free of special characters like !, ?, &, or accented letters.
Search engines read the slug as a signal of what a page is about. A slug like best-coffee-grinders-2024 tells Google immediately that the page covers coffee grinders. A slug like page-1187 tells it nothing. WordPress, Ghost, Shopify, and most other CMS platforms auto-generate slugs from post titles, but they often need cleaning up — extra words, special characters, or a different separator than you want.
Lowercase (on by default) converts all letters to lowercase. Most web servers and CMS platforms treat URLs as case-sensitive, so My-Page and my-page can resolve to different addresses. Keeping everything lowercase avoids duplicate-URL problems.
Use underscores instead of hyphens switches the word separator from - to _. Hyphens are the standard for web URLs and are treated as word separators by Google. Underscores join words into a single unit in Google's eyes, so coffee_grinder is read as one token. Use underscores only when the target system specifically requires them — for example, Python variable names or certain database identifiers.
Strip numbers removes all digits from the output — handy when you want a slug that won't go stale as year references change, or when a title includes a numbered list that you want left out of the URL.
Keep them short. Aim for 3–5 meaningful words. best-coffee-grinders is better than the-10-best-coffee-grinders-you-can-buy-in-2024-reviewed. Shorter slugs are easier to share, fit better in navigation menus, and tend to rank slightly better.
Leave out stop words when possible. Words like "the", "a", "and", "of" usually add length without adding meaning. guide-seo-beginners works as well as a-guide-to-seo-for-beginners.
Include your main keyword. If your page targets a specific search term, having it in the slug helps — both for SEO and for users who see the URL in search results before clicking.
Never change a live slug without a redirect. If a page is already indexed and has inbound links, changing its slug breaks those links and drops any ranking signals attached to the old URL. If you do change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one immediately.
Type or paste your title into the input box and the slug updates as you go — there's no button to press for the conversion itself. Spaces become hyphens, capitals drop to lowercase, and special characters fall away automatically.
Set the options to match where the slug is headed: leave Lowercase on for almost every website, switch to underscores only if the target system asks for them, and turn on Strip numbers when you want a slug that won't date. When it looks right, hit Copy Slug and paste it into your CMS.
Blog posts and articles. WordPress builds a slug from your title, but it keeps stop words and can run long. Clean it here before publishing so the URL stays short and keyword-focused.
Product and category pages. Online stores turn product names into URLs. A tidy slug like leather-office-chair reads better in search results and is easier to share than an auto-generated string of numbers.
Documentation and help centres. Support articles and docs use the slug in their permanent link. A descriptive slug helps readers guess the URL and helps search engines group related pages.
Landing pages and campaigns. Marketing URLs get pasted into emails, ads, and social posts. A clean slug looks trustworthy where a messy one with %20 and stray symbols looks broken.
The title 10 Best Coffee Grinders (2024 Review!) becomes 10-best-coffee-grinders-2024-review. Turn on Strip numbers and it's best-coffee-grinders-review — a slug that stays accurate when the year changes.
An accented title like Café Menu & Prices comes out as cafe-menu-prices: the é is folded to a plain e and the ampersand is dropped, so the URL works everywhere without percent-encoding.
How to Set Up Git on Windows converts to how-to-set-up-git-on-windows. Trim a couple of stop words yourself and you get the tighter set-up-git-windows, which still tells a reader exactly what the page covers.
Leaving the slug too long. Auto-generated slugs often keep every word of a headline. A 12-word slug is hard to read and share — trim it to the three to five words that carry the meaning.
Using underscores by habit. For normal web pages, hyphens are what search engines expect. Reach for underscores only when a specific system requires them, not as a default.
Changing a live slug without a redirect. Editing the URL of a page that's already indexed breaks inbound links and loses ranking. If you must change it, add a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one straight away.
Stuffing keywords. Repeating your target phrase — coffee-grinder-coffee-grinder-best-coffee-grinder — looks spammy and doesn't help rankings. One clear keyword is enough.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in a slug?
Use hyphens. Google has treated hyphens as word separators for many years, making word-count-tool equivalent to the phrase "word count tool" in its index. Underscores join terms, so word_count_tool is read as a single token. For standard web pages, hyphens are always the right choice.
Does the slug affect SEO?
Yes, modestly. Having a relevant keyword in your slug is a minor positive signal. More importantly, a clean, descriptive slug improves click-through rates in search results because users can see at a glance what the page covers. Avoid slug stuffing — repeating keywords or making slugs unnecessarily long hurts readability without benefiting rankings.
What happens to accented characters like é, ü, or ñ?
This tool strips accented characters and replaces them with their closest ASCII equivalent — so café becomes cafe and über becomes uber. This ensures the slug is universally readable in any browser and system without percent-encoding.
Can I convert multiple titles at once?
Paste each title on its own line — the tool processes the full block and produces a single combined slug for it. For bulk slug generation across many titles, use the tool repeatedly or paste them one at a time.
Is the tool free and private?
Yes. It's completely free with no signup, and the conversion runs entirely in your browser. Your titles are never uploaded to a server or stored anywhere, so you can slugify unpublished or sensitive titles safely.
How long should a URL slug be?
There's no hard rule, but three to five meaningful words is a good target. Short slugs are easier to read, share, and fit in menus, and they tend to look cleaner in search results. Very long slugs get truncated in some places and are harder for people to remember.
Can I edit the slug after the tool generates it?
Yes. The output is just text — copy it and trim or tweak it in your CMS. Many people use the tool to clean up the messy parts, then remove a stop word or two by hand for the final version.
What happens to emoji and symbols in the title?
Emoji, currency signs, punctuation, and other symbols are removed, since they can't appear in a clean URL without percent-encoding. Only letters, numbers, and your chosen separator remain in the finished slug.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. It's a single page that runs in any modern browser, so you can convert titles to slugs on a phone or tablet exactly as you would on a computer.