How to Create an SEO-Friendly URL Slug (Free Generator)

To create an SEO-friendly URL slug, paste your page title into the Case & Slug Converter and copy the URL slug output. It lowercases the text, removes accents, turns "&" into "and", replaces spaces and punctuation with single hyphens, and trims the result to 80 characters. For example, "Café Menu & Prices 2026" becomes cafe-menu-and-prices-2026.

What makes a slug SEO-friendly

A slug is the part of the URL that identifies a single page, like how-to-merge-pdf-files in toolstik.com/blog/how-to-merge-pdf-files. Google's URL structure guidelines recommend simple, descriptive words, and hyphens rather than underscores to separate them. In practice, a good slug is:

• Readable: real words that describe the page, not IDs like ?p=4821.
• Lowercase: some servers treat /Guide and /guide as different pages.
• Hyphenated: merge-pdf-files, not merge_pdf_files or mergepdffiles.
• Short and stable: long enough to describe the page, and not something you'll need to change next year.

How to generate a slug, step by step

1. Open the Case & Slug Converter. The Text to convert box starts with a sample title you can replace.
2. Paste your headline or product name.
3. Find the URL slug card. It's the first output in the grid, and it updates as you type.
4. Click the copy button on that card and paste the slug into your CMS, file name, or route.

The same screen also shows Title Case, Sentence case, camelCase, snake_case, kebab-case, and more, which is handy if you also need a variable name or a cleanly cased heading.

Exactly what the slug rules do

The URL slug output applies these rules in order:

1. Strips accents: "Résumé" becomes "resume" and "Köln" becomes "koln".
2. Lowercases everything.
3. Replaces "&" with "and", so "Q&A: Rock & Roll" becomes q-and-a-rock-and-roll.
4. Removes apostrophes, so "Don't" becomes "dont" rather than "don-t".
5. Turns any other run of symbols or spaces into one hyphen, so em dashes, colons, and double spaces don't produce --.
6. Trims hyphens from the start and end.
7. Caps the length at 80 characters, cutting at the last hyphen when that falls past the halfway point, so you don't end on half a word.

Worked examples

A long title such as "The Complete Beginner's Guide to Building Search-Friendly URL Slugs for Blogs, Shops, and Documentation Sites" is trimmed to the-complete-beginners-guide-to-building-search-friendly-url-slugs-for-blogs (76 characters). The cut makes sense, but a hand-edited version like url-slug-guide would be easier to read and share.

URL slug vs kebab-case

The converter shows both, and they look similar, but they behave differently:

• URL slug turns "&" into "and", removes apostrophes, and caps the length at 80 characters.
• kebab-case is meant for code identifiers. It drops "&" entirely, keeps apostrophes, splits camelCase words, and has no length cap. "Café Menu & Prices 2026" becomes cafe-menu-prices-2026, and "Don't Miss" becomes don't-miss.

For page URLs, use the URL slug output.

Best practices

• Edit after generating. The tool keeps every word, including "a", "the", and "to". Google doesn't require you to remove them, but trimming how-to-merge-pdf-files-on-a-mac to merge-pdf-files-mac can make a shorter, cleaner URL. Keep words that carry meaning.
• Match the slug to the page topic, not the full headline. Headlines change, and a slug should outlast them.
• Leave out dates unless the content is truly tied to one year. A slug like best-tools-2026 looks out of date the following year.
• Write the title and description next. Our guide on how to write a meta title and description covers the snippet people see in search, and the Meta Title & Description Checker previews it.

Common mistakes

• Changing a live URL without a redirect. Old links and bookmarks will break. If you must rename a slug, add a 301 redirect from the old address.
• Stuffing keywords. free-pdf-merge-merge-pdf-free-online reads as spam to people and adds nothing.
• Mixing cases or underscores across a site, which makes URLs harder to type and remember.

Troubleshooting

The slug is empty. The generator only keeps the letters a–z and numbers 0–9. Text written only in non-Latin scripts, such as Cyrillic, Arabic, or Chinese, is removed completely. Write a transliterated or English slug by hand.

Some letters turned into hyphens. Common European letters that aren't simply accented, such as ß, ø, æ, and ł, are transliterated ("Straße in Köln" becomes strasse-in-koln). Rarer symbols and letters outside the Latin alphabet are treated as separators, so check the result and fix those by hand.

You need to put non-ASCII text in a URL. If you're keeping the original characters in a URL or query string, percent-encode them with the URL Encoder/Decoder.

Alternatives

Most content management systems create a slug from your post title automatically, and you can usually edit it in the post settings. The rules vary: some keep stop words or accented characters, and some don't cap the length. A separate generator is useful when you're building routes by hand, naming files, or want the same predictable rules everywhere.

Privacy

The Case & Slug Converter runs in your browser, and nothing you type is uploaded. For more writing and search tools, see free SEO and text tools, and use the Word Counter to check the length of the copy that goes with your new URL.