What makes a good slug
A slug is the readable part of a URL after the domain. Best practice is lowercase, words joined by hyphens (not underscores — Google treats underscores as joiners), 3–5 meaningful words, and no stop words or dates unless they matter. “Hello World! 2026” → hello-world-2026 follows all of these.
Skip filler like “a”, “the” and “how to” unless they carry meaning, and keep the head keyword at the front — WordPress, Ghost, Shopify and most static site generators all accept this exact format.
For a closely related job, the URL encoder does it in one click.
How the conversion works
The text is lowercased, Unicode-normalised so accents are stripped (“café” → “cafe”), and every run of characters that is not a–z or 0–9 becomes one hyphen. Leading and trailing hyphens are trimmed, so punctuation at the end never leaves a dangling dash. Only need lowercase without hyphens? Use the case converter.
The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so the titles you paste are never uploaded, transmitted or stored on a server. Worked example: “10 Best Cafés in Kraków (2026 Guide)” becomes 10-best-cafes-in-krakow-2026-guide, which you would usually shorten by hand to best-cafes-krakow.
Slug length and SEO
Shorter URLs tend to rank and get clicked slightly better; aim for under 60 characters total. Never change a live slug without a 301 redirect, or you lose the accumulated links. Check the final length with the character counter before publishing.
Frequently asked questions
- What slug does “Hello World! 2026” produce?
- hello-world-2026 — lowercase, punctuation removed and spaces replaced by hyphens.
- Hyphens or underscores in URLs?
- Hyphens. Search engines read hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners.
- What happens to accented letters?
- They are normalised to their base letter, so “café” becomes “cafe”.
- How long should a slug be?
- Three to five meaningful words, ideally keeping the whole URL under about 60 characters.
- What happens to Cyrillic, Greek or Chinese titles?
- Characters outside a–z and 0–9 are removed, so a title written entirely in a non-Latin script can come back empty or nearly empty. Transliterate it into Latin letters first, then paste the transliteration here.