Text to Slug
Turn a headline into a clean, URL-safe slug.
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All text toolsQuestions
What happens to accented characters?
They are folded to their base letter rather than deleted, so 'Crème Brûlée' becomes creme-brulee and not crme-brle. This uses Unicode NFD decomposition to split each letter from its accent before dropping the accent, which is why it works consistently across French, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and every other Latin-alphabet language.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?
Hyphens. Google has stated for years that it treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so png_to_webp can be read as one token while png-to-webp reads as three words. Underscores are still the right choice for filenames and database column names, which is why both options are offered here.
How long should a slug be?
There is no ranking penalty for length, but there is a usability one — long URLs get truncated in search results, wrap badly in emails and are painful to read aloud. Three to six meaningful words is a good target. Set a maximum length and the tool cuts at a word boundary, so you never end up with a slug ending mid-word.
Can I convert a whole list of titles at once?
Yes. Paste one title per line and you get one slug per line back, each with its character count shown so you can spot any that run long. That makes it practical for planning a content calendar or migrating a batch of pages in one pass rather than one at a time.
Is it safe to change a slug after publishing?
Only with a redirect. Changing a published slug breaks every existing link to that page — bookmarks, inbound links and any ranking the old URL had earned. If you must change one, set up a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one so both people and search engines are carried across.
About slug generator
What a slug is for
A slug is the human-readable part of a URL — the convert-png-to-webp in myquicktools.io/convert-png-to-webp. It exists because URLs have to survive being copied into emails, typed by hand, printed on paper and parsed by machines that were written decades ago. Anything outside a small safe set of characters gets percent-encoded, which turns a readable link into%C3%A8%20 soup.
The rules this follows
- Accents are folded, not deleted. “Crème Brûlée” becomes
creme-brulee, notcrme-brle. This uses Unicode NFD decomposition to separate each letter from its accent, then drops the accent — which is why it works for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and anything else built on the Latin alphabet. - Ligatures and special letters are spelled out. ß becomes
ss, æ becomesae, ø becomeso, ł becomesl. These have no accent to strip, so they need explicit mapping. - & becomes “and”.Losing it entirely turns “Design & Build” into
design-build, which reads as something else. - Runs collapse and edges are trimmed. No slug ever starts or ends with a separator, and you never get
--in the middle.
Hyphens, not underscores
For URLs, use hyphens. Google has said for years that it treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so png_to_webp can be read as the single token png_to_webp while png-to-webp is read as three words. Underscores remain the right choice for filenames and database columns, which is why both are offered here.
How long should a slug be?
There is no ranking penalty for a long slug, but there is a usability one: long URLs get truncated in search results, wrap badly in emails and are miserable to read aloud. Aim for three to six meaningful words. Set a max length above and the tool will cut at a word boundary rather than mid-word, so you never end up with how-to-convert-p.
Once a slug is published, changing it breaks every link pointing at it. If you must change one, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
Related
Browse the rest of the text tools, or reformat a heading first with the case converter.