Slug Generator

How to generate a URL slug from text?

URL slugs are the human-readable portion of a web address that identifies a specific page. Generating clean slugs is essential for SEO, user experience, and content organization:

• Enter your title, heading, or any text into the input field. This could be a blog post title like '10 Best Practices for React Performance in 2024', a product name like 'iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB - Space Black', or a category name like 'Tài liệu hướng dẫn sử dụng'. The slug generator processes whatever text you provide and converts it into a URL-safe format.
• Review the generated slug displayed below the input. The tool automatically applies several transformations: converting to lowercase, replacing spaces and certain punctuation with hyphens, removing special characters and symbols, normalizing accented and Unicode characters to their ASCII equivalents, collapsing multiple consecutive hyphens into a single hyphen, and trimming leading/trailing hyphens. For example, 'Hello World! @#$' becomes 'hello-world'.
• Customize slug options if needed: choose your separator character (hyphen '-' is standard, underscore '_' is an alternative), toggle case conversion (lowercase is recommended for URLs), enable Unicode normalization (converts 'café' to 'cafe', 'naïve' to 'naive'), and set a maximum length to truncate overly long slugs. These options let you match the slug format required by your CMS, framework, or API.
• Copy the generated slug and use it in your URL structure. Paste it into your CMS slug field, append it to your domain as '/blog/my-post-title/', or include it in API endpoints. The slug is ready to use immediately — no additional formatting required.

The anatomy of an SEO-friendly slug

A well-crafted URL slug balances three competing priorities: readability, SEO effectiveness, and technical compatibility. Readability means users can understand the page topic just by reading the URL — 'your-site.com/blog/react-performance-tips' clearly communicates content about React performance. SEO effectiveness means including relevant keywords that search engines use for ranking signals — Google has confirmed that URL content is a minor ranking factor, and descriptive slugs improve click-through rates from search results pages. Technical compatibility means the slug conforms to RFC 3986 URI standards: lowercase letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores only; no spaces, no special characters, no uppercase letters (which some servers treat as different paths due to case-sensitive routing). The ideal slug length is 3-5 words — long enough to be descriptive but short enough to display fully in search results without truncation. Avoid stop words (a, an, the, and, or) unless they're essential for meaning, as they add length without SEO value. Use hyphens as word separators, not underscores, because Google treats hyphens as word boundaries while treating underscores as word joiners — 'best-practices' is read as two words, but 'best_practices' may be read as one. Never use dynamic identifiers like IDs in public-facing slugs unless necessary; instead, use descriptive text that remains meaningful even if the underlying ID changes.

Handling Unicode, diacritics, and international text

International websites face unique slug challenges when dealing with non-ASCII characters. Vietnamese text like 'Cách tạo slug thân thiện với SEO' contains characters (ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ, ư) that are invalid in URLs and must be transliterated. Proper transliteration maps these characters to their closest ASCII equivalents: 'cách-tạo-slug-thân-thiện-với-seo'. Spanish 'café' becomes 'cafe', German 'München' becomes 'munchen', French 'naïve' becomes 'naive'. Some CMS platforms handle this automatically — WordPress transliterates Unicode to ASCII slugs, and frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt have built-in slug normalization. However, relying on automatic transliteration isn't always reliable, especially for less common character sets. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters cannot be transliterated to ASCII and must either be encoded as percent-encoded UTF-8 (%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87) or converted to pinyin/romanization. Our slug generator handles Vietnamese diacritics comprehensively, mapping all base characters and tone marks correctly. For other languages, the generator applies standard Unicode NFC normalization and attempts reasonable ASCII approximations. When building multilingual sites, consider maintaining separate slug versions per language locale rather than forcing all text through a single transliteration pipeline.