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Text to Slug Converter
Turn a title into a clean, URL-safe slug.
A blog post titled “10 Tips for Better Sleep (2026 Guide)!” cannot go straight into a URL. Parentheses, an exclamation mark and spaces all cause problems, so it needs to become something like 10-tips-for-better-sleep-2026-guide first.
What actually makes a good slug
A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page — in webtoolspanel.com/text-to-slug, the slug is text-to-slug. Good ones are lowercase, use hyphens rather than underscores or spaces, and are short enough to read at a glance in a browser tab or a search result.
Google explicitly recommends hyphens over underscores, because it treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joining character — text-to-slug is read as three words, text_to_slug is read as one long token. That distinction genuinely affects how the page can be found by keyword search.
Converting a title to a slug
- Paste or type your title.
- Convert it — the tool lowercases everything, strips punctuation, and replaces spaces with hyphens.
- Check that accented characters converted sensibly, for example “café” becoming
caferather than being dropped. - Trim the slug if it is still long — aim for the fewest words that still describe the page.
- Use the result as your URL, page filename or CMS permalink.
Rules a clean slug follows
- Lowercase only — URLs are technically case-sensitive, and mixed case invites duplicate-content confusion.
- Hyphens between words, never underscores or spaces.
- No accents or special characters — “naïve” becomes
naive, notna-veor a percent-encoded mess. - No stop words you do not need — drop “a”, “the” and “of” where the slug still reads clearly without them.
- Short enough to be typed and remembered — five or six meaningful words is usually the practical ceiling.
The mistake that breaks links later
Changing the slug of a page that is already live and already indexed or linked elsewhere breaks every one of those links the moment you save the change — visitors and search engines alike hit a 404 where your page used to be. If you must change a slug on a published page, set up a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one at the same time, so existing links and search rankings carry over instead of resetting to zero.
Text to slug questions
Why do slugs use hyphens instead of underscores?
Search engines, Google in particular, treat a hyphen as a space between words but read an underscore as joining two words into one token. Hyphens make the individual words in your slug findable by search; underscores can hide them.
What happens to accented letters like é or ñ?
They get converted to their closest plain-ASCII equivalent, so “naïve” becomes naive and “piñata” becomes pinata, rather than being deleted or left as broken characters in the URL.
Is it safe to change a slug on a page that is already published?
Only if you add a redirect from the old URL to the new one. Without a redirect, every existing link, bookmark and search result pointing at the old slug returns a 404 error.
How long should a slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance and still describe the page — most well-performing slugs run three to six words. Very long slugs are harder to read, share and remember, without a meaningful SEO benefit.
Should I include numbers or dates in a slug?
Only if they are genuinely part of what identifies the content, like a year in an annually updated guide. Avoid database IDs or arbitrary numbers, which mean nothing to a person reading the URL.
