SEO

Free URL slug generator with stop word control

Name: URL Slug Generator
Author: Charles Summers

By Charles Summers · Updated 8 August 2026 · Free, no signup

Short answer

This converts a page title into a URL slug by lowercasing it, decomposing accented characters to their base letters, converting symbols such as ampersands into words, stripping the remaining punctuation, collapsing repeated separators and truncating on a word boundary rather than mid-word. Stop word removal is optional and checked, because dropping words like for, with and how frequently changes what the URL claims the page is about, and the tool flags the cases where that has happened rather than silently shortening the string.

Use the url slug generator

What does this tool actually do?

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, no account is required, and there is no usage limit, because there is no cost per run to control.

What the slug is doing, and what it is not

A slug has three jobs and none of them is ranking. It is read by a person deciding whether to click a link that has been pasted into a message with no other context. It is displayed in search results, where Google shows a breadcrumb-style path rather than the raw URL and will often shorten it. And it is the permanent identifier for the page, which means every decision you make in it is a decision you are committing to, because changing it later is a redirect rather than an edit.

Google has been consistent that words in the URL are a very small factor, and treating slug optimisation as a ranking activity is how people end up with keyword-stuffed paths that read like a spreadsheet column. The gain from a good slug is human: a higher click-through rate on a shared link, fewer support emails asking what a URL points at, and an internal linking structure that a new colleague can read.

One property does bite technically, and it is the one people forget. On most Linux servers the path is case sensitive, so /About-Us and /about-us are two different URLs. If both resolve, you have created a duplicate that competes with itself and splits any links pointing at it. Windows servers are case insensitive, which means the same site can behave differently depending where it is hosted, and a migration between the two can silently create or collapse duplicates. The safe rule is lowercase everywhere, enforced with a redirect rather than a convention people are expected to remember.

Hyphens, underscores, and what happens to accented characters

Google treats hyphens as word separators and does not treat underscores that way, so red_sunset is read closer to one token while red-sunset is read as two words. This is the rare piece of URL advice that comes straight from Google rather than from folklore, and it is why every recommendation you will read says hyphen. Underscores are not broken and they will not get you penalised. They just make the words harder to identify, which is the only job the separator has.

Accented characters are more interesting, and the mechanism explains a class of bug that is otherwise baffling. A URL path can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters, so anything else has to be percent-encoded as UTF-8 bytes. That turns a readable word into a string of percent signs the moment it is copied out of the browser address bar and pasted somewhere that does not decode it. Worse, the same visible character can be encoded two different ways: as a single precomposed code point, or as a base letter followed by a combining accent. Those are different byte sequences, therefore different URLs, and one of them will 404 while looking identical to the other on screen.

The fix is to transliterate before the URL exists rather than encode after. This tool decomposes the string into base letters plus combining marks and drops the marks, which handles the entire accented Latin range in one pass, then applies an explicit map for the letters that have no base form to fall back to: the German sharp s becomes ss, the ash and ethel ligatures become ae and oe, the Scandinavian slashed o becomes o, and the Polish stroked l becomes l. Symbols are converted to words rather than deleted, because an ampersand that vanishes turns research and development into researchdevelopment, while apostrophes are removed without leaving a separator so that a contraction stays one word rather than splitting in half.

Stop word removal: a small win and a real risk

Removing stop words shortens the slug and removes filler, and that is genuinely the whole benefit. There is no evidence that dropping the from a URL improves how a page ranks, and anyone presenting it as a ranking tactic is repeating something they read rather than something they measured. Shorter is easier to read, easier to paste and less likely to be shortened in a results page, which is enough reason to do it when it is safe.

It is not always safe, because standard stop word lists were built for search indexing and not for meaning. They contain the words that carry the relationship between the other words, and stripping those changes what the URL says the page is.

Question words. Drop how from how to fix a leaking tap and the slug becomes fix-leaking-tap, which is the same slug your instructional video and your service page both want. Three different pages, one identifier.
Prepositions that carry the relationship. Insurance for contractors and contractor insurance are close. Migrating from Salesforce and migrating to Salesforce are opposites, and both reduce to migrating-salesforce.
Negations and comparatives. This tool refuses to remove not, no, nor, without, versus and vs regardless of the setting, because those are the words that invert the meaning entirely and they appear on some published stop word lists.
Anything that leaves you with two words. A two-token slug on a large site is a collision waiting to happen, and it is the point at which slugs stop being distinguishable from each other in an internal link audit.
Proper nouns that contain stop words. The The and A Tribe Called Quest are the funny examples; the common one is a product name that begins with an article and becomes unrecognisable without it.

Changing an existing slug is a migration

Once a URL has been published it has accumulated things that are not stored on your server: inbound links, bookmarks, entries in other people’s content management systems, share counts on platforms that key them to the URL string, and rows in your own analytics that will now split into two. Renaming the slug abandons all of it unless you redirect, and a 301 preserves most but not all of the value. That is a fine trade when the current slug is actually wrong. It is a bad trade when someone simply prefers the new wording.

The corollary is to keep volatile things out of the slug in the first place. A year is the obvious one: publishing best-crm-2026 commits you to either an annual rename with an annual redirect, or a page whose URL contradicts its own updated content. Date-based path structures have the same problem at scale, which is why so many sites carry a permanent redirect layer from an old year-and-month URL scheme that nobody chose deliberately. Category folders are the other trap, because they encode a taxonomy that will be reorganised long before the content is retired.

If you do rename, do the whole job in one deploy: the 301, the internal links updated at source rather than left to hop through the redirect, the canonical tag, the sitemap entry, and the og:url tag which is keyed to the old string and will otherwise keep consolidating shares onto a URL that no longer exists. Expect a period of instability while the new URL is recrawled and the old signals transfer, and do not schedule the rename in the same week as anything else you might want to measure.

Numbers worth knowing

Metric	Typical	What it means
Hyphen versus underscore	hyphen separates, underscore joins	Google documents hyphens as word separators and does not treat underscores the same way. Neither is penalised; one just makes the words identifiable and the other does not.
Practical slug length	3 to 5 words	Long enough to be unique and readable, short enough to survive being shown as a shortened path in results and being pasted into a chat window without wrapping.
Path case sensitivity	case sensitive on Linux	Two URLs differing only in capitalisation are two pages on most hosting and one page on Windows servers, which is how a migration silently creates duplicates.
Ranking weight of words in the URL	very small	Google has said so repeatedly. Slug work is a readability and click-through exercise, and a keyword-stuffed path buys nothing while looking like it was written for a machine.
Cost of renaming a live slug	a 301 plus a recrawl period	The redirect preserves most link value but not the bookmarks, the share counts keyed to the old string, or the continuity of your analytics for that page.

Mistakes that quietly cost you results

Putting the year, or a word like new, in the slug: Both expire. You then choose between renaming annually with a redirect each time, or leaving a URL that contradicts the updated page. Keep the year in the title where you can edit it freely and out of the identifier you cannot.
Letting the CMS use the whole title as the slug: A ninety-character path gets shortened in results, wraps badly in messages and buries the distinguishing words at the end. Take the three to five words that identify the page and drop the rest, at publish time rather than later.
Stripping stop words with a standard list and no review: Those lists contain the prepositions and question words that carry the meaning, so migrating-from-salesforce and migrating-to-salesforce collapse into the same slug. Strip filler, then read the result as though you had never seen the title.
Allowing capital letters anywhere in the path: On a case-sensitive server that creates a second URL for the same content, and every link that mistypes the case either 404s or duplicates. Lowercase at generation and enforce it with a redirect rather than a house style.
Renaming a slug and adding the redirect afterwards: Between the two deploys every existing link 404s, and a 404 that Google recrawls during that window can be dropped from the index. Ship the redirect in the same release, and update internal links at source instead of relying on the hop.

What does the output look like?

This is the exact output the tool produces from the example inputs. It is generated by the same code that runs when you click the button, so what you see here is what you get.

BEFORE How to Migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot (Without Losing Data) — 2026 Guide AFTER migrate-salesforce-hubspot-without-losing-data-2026-guide 57 characters, 8 word(s), hyphen separated, limit 60 /migrate-salesforce-hubspot-without-losing-data-2026-guide/ WHAT WAS DONE 1. Lowercased 9 capital letter(s). 2. Replaced 3 punctuation or symbol character(s) with the separator, then collapsed the repeats. 3. Removed 4 stop word(s): how, to, from. BOTH VERSIONS, SO YOU CAN COMPARE stop words kept how-to-migrate-from-salesforce-to-hubspot-without-losing-data-2026-guide (72 chars) stop words removed migrate-salesforce-hubspot-without-losing-data-2026-guide (57 chars, 15 shorter) AMBIGUITY CHECK 1. HIGH: removed the question word "how". The slug no longer distinguishes a how-to from a definition or a product page on the same subject, and those are usually three different pages. 2. HIGH: removed the relational words "to", "from". These carry direction and ownership, so "from X" and "to X" reduce to the same string. Read the slug back and check it still says what the page says. 3. MEDIUM: the title contains a year. In the slug that becomes an annual rename plus an annual redirect, or a URL that contradicts the updated page. Keep the year in the title, out of the path. PROTECTED FROM REMOVAL "without" appears on some published stop word lists and was kept regardless of the setting, because removing it inverts the meaning of the phrase. BEFORE YOU PUBLISH IT 1. Read the slug on its own, without the title above it. If you cannot tell what the page is, it is too short. 2. Check nothing else on the site already uses it. Two pages sharing a slug is a collision your CMS will resolve by appending a number. 3. Keep it lowercase in every link you write. Paths are case sensitive on most servers, so /Migrate-salesforce-hubspot-without-losing-data-2026-guide/ is a second URL. 4. If the page is already live under a different slug, ship the 301, the internal link updates, the canonical and the og:url change in one release.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and does not treat an underscore the same way, so an underscored slug reads closer to a single long token. Underscores are not penalised and an existing site full of them is not worth migrating for this reason alone, but for anything new the hyphen is free and does the job the separator exists to do.

How short should a slug be?

Three to five words is the range that stays readable without becoming generic. The real constraint is not a character limit imposed by search engines, it is that a long path gets shortened in results, wraps awkwardly when pasted, and pushes the distinguishing words to the end where they are the first thing cut. Two words or fewer is usually too generic to stay unique on a site of any size.

Is it safe to remove stop words?

Sometimes. Removing articles and filler is harmless and makes the slug shorter. Removing prepositions and question words is not, because they carry the relationship between the other words: migrating from and migrating to reduce to the same slug and mean opposite things. This tool never removes not, no, nor, without, versus or vs, and it flags the cases where what it did remove has made the result ambiguous.

What happens to accented and non-Latin characters?

Accented Latin characters are decomposed into a base letter and a combining mark, and the mark is dropped, so an e-acute becomes e. Letters with no base form, such as the German sharp s or the ash ligature, are mapped explicitly to ss and ae. The alternative is percent-encoding, which produces a URL that looks fine in the address bar and becomes an unreadable string of bytes the moment anybody copies it.

Can I change the slug on a page that is already live?

You can, but treat it as a migration rather than an edit. Ship a 301 from the old URL in the same release, update internal links at source instead of letting them hop through the redirect, and fix the canonical, the sitemap entry and the og:url tag which is keyed to the old string. Expect a recrawl period where rankings for that page move around.

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