Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?

Hyphens. Search engines treat them as word separators and underscores as joiners, so my_blog_post reads as one token and my-blog-post as three. Underscores also vanish under the underline that links usually carry.

What happens to accented characters?

They are transliterated — café becomes cafe, naïve becomes naive. Leaving them in would produce percent-encoded escapes that turn unreadable the moment the URL is pasted into plain text.

How long should a slug be?

Long enough to be descriptive, short enough to read at a glance — three to six words is typical. Dropping filler words like 'the' and 'a' usually improves it without losing meaning.

Should I include numbers or dates in a slug?

Only if they are genuinely part of the identity of the page. A date in the URL makes an evergreen article look stale and makes it awkward to update, which is why most publications moved away from it.

Does changing a slug affect SEO?

Yes — the old URL becomes a 404 and loses whatever ranking it had. If you must change one, set up a 301 redirect from the old address so links and ranking signals carry over.

URL Slug Generator

Turn any title into a clean, readable URL slug — accents folded, punctuation gone.

DeveloperRuns in your browserFree, no signup

About the URL Slug Generator

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL. Making one means lowercasing, replacing spaces with hyphens, stripping punctuation, and collapsing runs of separators — so 'How to Bake Bread: A Beginner's Guide' becomes how-to-bake-bread-a-beginners-guide.

Accented and non-Latin characters are transliterated rather than dropped, so café becomes cafe rather than caf. That is the behaviour you want for search and for sharing: percent-encoded UTF-8 in a URL is legal but turns into an unreadable string of escapes the moment it is copied into a plain-text context.

Hyphens rather than underscores, by convention and for a practical reason: a URL is often rendered underlined, and an underscore disappears beneath the line. Google has also long treated hyphens as word separators and underscores as joiners.

How it works

Paste one title per line — the whole list is converted at once.
Accented letters fold to their ASCII base, punctuation is dropped and spaces become your chosen separator.
Duplicate slugs are numbered automatically, so a batch is always safe to use as URLs.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?: Hyphens. Search engines treat them as word separators and underscores as joiners, so my_blog_post reads as one token and my-blog-post as three. Underscores also vanish under the underline that links usually carry.
What happens to accented characters?: They are transliterated — café becomes cafe, naïve becomes naive. Leaving them in would produce percent-encoded escapes that turn unreadable the moment the URL is pasted into plain text.
How long should a slug be?: Long enough to be descriptive, short enough to read at a glance — three to six words is typical. Dropping filler words like 'the' and 'a' usually improves it without losing meaning.
Should I include numbers or dates in a slug?: Only if they are genuinely part of the identity of the page. A date in the URL makes an evergreen article look stale and makes it awkward to update, which is why most publications moved away from it.
Does changing a slug affect SEO?: Yes — the old URL becomes a 404 and loses whatever ranking it had. If you must change one, set up a 301 redirect from the old address so links and ranking signals carry over.

Privacy

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