Slug Generator

What this tool does

Turns a title into the part of a URL after the last slash: lowercase, ASCII, hyphen-separated, free of anything needing percent-encoding. It updates as you type and shows title and slug together, so you can see what each character became.

The list mode does the same for a whole column at once, which is what you want when you are generating permalinks for two hundred imported posts rather than one new page.

Common uses

• Creating a permalink for a CMS post, a documentation page or a product listing.
• Migrating content into a static site generator, where every Markdown file needs a filename derived from its title.
• Naming a Git branch or a Kubernetes resource, both of which reject most punctuation.
• Building a stable anchor id for a heading.

A short example

The title:

Café Müller & Søn — 50% Off Naïve Piñata Crème Brûlée!

becomes:

cafe-mueller-and-son-50-percent-off-naive-pinata-creme-brulee

Four mechanisms did that: ü was transliterated to ue, & expanded to and, é and ï were folded to bare letters, and punctuation became separators that were collapsed and trimmed.

Folding versus transliteration

Accented Latin letters are handled by Unicode normalisation, not a lookup table. Normalising to NFD splits é into e plus a combining acute accent; deleting every combining mark leaves e. One rule covers Latin-1, Central European and Vietnamese, including stacked marks like the ế in Tiếng Việt.

Some letters cannot be folded that way, because their ASCII form is a different letter or several: ß, ø, ł, æ, þ and every Cyrillic character. Those come from an explicit table. German umlauts follow the German convention — ä → ae, so Müller becomes mueller, matching DIN 5007 variant 2 and what German sites publish. Cyrillic follows the usual English romanisation, so щ is shch and ж is zh.

Scripts with no entry — Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai — cannot be transliterated by any rule this small, so those characters are dropped and named. If the result comes back empty, that is why.

Worth knowing

Slugs are permanent in practice: changing one after publication breaks every inbound link unless you add a redirect, so set the maximum length before publishing. Truncation happens at a separator, never mid-word — a 40-character cap turns getting-started-with-static-site-generators into getting-started-with-static-site, not …-generat.

Length itself is not a ranking factor. Google has said repeatedly that words in a URL are a very small signal; the argument for a short slug is that people paste URLs into chat. One habit worth keeping is leaving dates out unless they are part of the identity — a slug containing 2024 looks stale the following January.