A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page, such as the my-first-post part of example.com/blog/my-first-post. Good slugs are short, lowercase, and use hyphens between words for readability and SEO.

Why are accented letters changed?

URLs are safest when limited to ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens. The tool normalises text to NFD form and removes combining diacritics so that café becomes cafe, avoiding percent-encoding that makes URLs ugly and harder to share.

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Search engines treat hyphens as word separators but underscores as joiners, so hyphens are the standard recommendation for SEO-friendly URLs. Underscores are mainly used for filenames or code identifiers.

Does it handle multiple spaces and symbols?

Yes. Runs of spaces, punctuation, and symbols all collapse to a single separator, and leading or trailing separators are trimmed, so messy input still yields a tidy slug.

Turn any title or heading into a clean URL slug. Strips accents and diacritics, lowercases, removes punctuation and symbols, and joins words with single hyphens. Runs entirely in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Slugify — Gera Tools

Name: Slugify
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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A slug is the readable, URL-safe identifier at the end of a web address. This tool converts any title or phrase into a clean slug by stripping accents, lowercasing, removing punctuation, and joining words with a single separator.

How it works

The conversion runs through a fixed pipeline:

1. Unicode-normalise to NFD, then remove combining marks (é → e)
2. Lowercase (optional)
3. Replace every run of non-alphanumeric characters with the separator
4. Trim leading and trailing separators

Normalising to NFD splits an accented character into its base letter plus a separate combining mark, which is then dropped. Collapsing all non-alphanumeric runs to one separator means spaces, commas, slashes, and emoji all turn into a single hyphen.

Worked examples

Input	Slug
`Crème Brûlée: 10 Best Recipes!`	`creme-brulee-10-best-recipes`
`What is GraphQL?`	`what-is-graphql`
`Naïve user expectations — a designer's guide`	`naive-user-expectations-a-designers-guide`
`café & restaurant reviews`	`cafe-restaurant-reviews`

Notice that the ampersand, em dash, and question mark all collapse to a single separator (or are trimmed if they land at the boundary).

Hyphens vs underscores — which to use

Choose hyphens for URLs in almost every case. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word boundary, meaning how-to-make-bread is correctly parsed as four separate words. An underscore joins words, so how_to_make_bread may be read as one token. The exception is filenames or code identifiers that live outside public URLs — underscores are conventional there.

Writing good slugs

A good slug is short, descriptive, and stable. Practical guidelines:

Keep only the meaningful words. how-to-make-sourdough-bread is better than how-to-make-sourdough-bread-at-home-a-beginners-guide-2024.
Drop stop words where they add no meaning. “a”, “an”, “the”, “of” can often be removed without losing clarity. Use judgement — some phrases need them.
Avoid dates in the slug unless the content is genuinely time-bound. A slug like best-cameras-2024 will read as stale in a year; best-cameras stays evergreen.
Never change a live slug. Once a page is indexed and linked, changing the slug breaks every inbound link and resets the page’s search history. If you must change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one.

When to use the underscore option

Switch to underscore as separator when generating identifiers for code (Python module names, database table names, CSS class names in some systems) rather than web URLs. For anything that will appear in a browser address bar, stay with hyphens.