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URL Slug Generator

A title in, a clean URL out — in any alphabet. Free, no sign-up.

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the-complete-guide-to-technical-seo-in-2026

https://example.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-technical-seo-in-2026

8 words. Past five or six words a slug stops being readable and starts being a sentence. Keep the words that identify the page.

3 stop words in the slug. "the", "to", "in" add length without adding meaning. Turn on "drop stop words" to remove them.

The slug contains a year. A year in the URL dates the page. When you refresh the content next year you either keep a stale URL or change it and redirect. Put the year in the title, not the slug.

Lowercased. URLs are case-sensitive on most servers, so /My-Page and /my-page are two pages. Lowercase avoids the duplicate.

Maximum length · 60 characters

Cuts at a word boundary, never mid-word. 0 turns the limit off.

Your URL prefix

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Technical SEO guide

URL slugs: hyphens over underscores, why the year has to go, and what to do with non-Latin titles

The slug is the human-readable end of a URL — the url-slug-generator in this page’s address. It is a small decision that is expensive to change later, because changing it means a redirect, and redirects accumulate.

What a good slug looks like

https://example.com/blog/technical-seo-guide        ← short, readable, stable
https://example.com/blog/p=1423                     ← says nothing
https://example.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-technical-seo-in-2026-updated  ← long, dated
https://example.com/blog/technical_seo_guide        ← underscores
https://example.com/blog/tekni%C4%9F-seo            ← unencoded non-Latin
  • Three to five meaningful words. Enough to identify the page in a list of links.
  • Lowercase. Most servers treat /My-Page and /my-page as two URLs; pick one and it is always the lowercase one.
  • Hyphens between words. Google documents the hyphen as a word separator and the underscore as a word joiner, so seo_guide can be read as a single token.
  • ASCII letters and digits only. Anything else gets percent-encoded and becomes unreadable when copied.
  • No dates, no version numbers, no “final”. They age, and the URL outlives them.

Why the year in the slug is a trap

A title like “The Complete Guide to Technical SEO in 2026” is fine — titles are cheap to update. Putting 2026 in the slug is not, because next January you have two bad options: leave a URL that says 2026 on a page about 2027, or change the URL and carry a redirect forever. Keep the year in the <title>, where it helps the click, and out of the path, where it only sets a clock.

Stop words: remove them, or not?

“the”, “a”, “of”, “to”, “and” carry no meaning in a URL, and dropping them is the common practice for a reason: it shortens the slug without losing the subject. The caveat is readability. /how-to-write-a-slug reads as English; /write-slug reads as a database key. Drop them when the slug is getting long, keep them when removing them would make the phrase strange. The toggle above never returns an empty slug — a title made entirely of stop words keeps its words.

Non-Latin titles: transliterate, do not delete

This is where most free slug tools fail. Give them a Turkish, Russian or Greek title and they strip every character they do not recognise, leaving an empty slug or a fragment. The correct move is transliteration: romanise the letters so the URL stays readable and stable.

Şeker Bayramı için 10 Tarif   →  seker-bayrami-icin-10-tarif
Привет мир: как писать URL    →  privet-mir-kak-pisat-url
Καλημέρα κόσμε                →  kalimera-kosme
Schöne Grüße (German mode)    →  schoene-gruesse

Browsers do display percent-encoded UTF-8 slugs as their original characters, and Google handles them, so a native-script URL is not broken. It is fragile: pasted into a plain-text email, a spreadsheet or a chat log it turns into %D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8, and it is impossible to read aloud. Romanised slugs survive being copied.

German is the one language with a real convention of its own: ö becomes oe, not o. The toggle above switches between the two.

Changing a slug on a live page

If the page has been published, the old URL has links, bookmarks and rankings attached to it. Changing the slug means:

  1. Publish the new URL.
  2. Add a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one.
  3. Update every internal link that pointed at the old URL — a redirect works, but each hop costs a round trip.
  4. Leave the redirect in place for at least a year; in practice, forever.

The redirect checker traces the chain afterwards, and the internal link checker finds the links still pointing at the old URL. If the page is not published yet, none of this applies — pick the right slug now and the problem never exists.

Frequently asked

Does the slug affect rankings?

Barely, directly. Google has said words in the URL are a very small factor. What it does affect is the click: the slug is shown in the search result and in every shared link, and a readable one tells a person what they are about to open.

Should the slug match the title exactly?

No. The title is written for a person scanning results; the slug is a short, stable identifier. A slug that is the first three or four significant words of the title is usually right.

Can a slug contain numbers?

Yes — “10-tips” is fine and often useful. What to avoid is a number that is really a date or a version, and an ID that means nothing to a reader.

How long is too long?

There is no hard limit, but Google truncates the URL it displays, and slugs past about 60 characters get cut in the middle. The generator warns past 75 and can cut at a word boundary for you.