Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?

Hyphens. Google has stated for years that it treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners, so 'red_shoes' can be read as one token while 'red-shoes' is read as two words. Every slug this tool produces uses hyphens.

How long should a slug be?

Long enough to describe the page and no longer — typically three to five words. Very long slugs get truncated in search results and are awkward to share. Dropping filler like 'the', 'a' and 'how to' usually shortens a slug without losing meaning.

Can I change a slug after publishing?

You can, but the old URL will 404 unless you add a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. Any links and ranking signals pointing at the old URL are lost without that redirect, so it is worth settling on a slug before you publish.

What happens to accented or non-Latin characters?

They are stripped, because they would otherwise need percent-encoding and turn into unreadable strings like %C3%A9 when shared. If your site serves a non-Latin-script audience, check whether your CMS supports internationalised slugs before relying on this behaviour.

Text & Writing

Text to URL Slug Generator

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL after the domain — the `text-to-slug` in this page's address. This tool converts a title into one: lowercase, spaces replaced by hyphens, ampersands spelled out as 'and', and every character that would need percent-encoding removed.

Free, no signupRuns entirely in your browser

Input

Text to Convert

Result

awesome-vibeland-website-playground

About

What the Text to URL Slug Generator does

Getting slugs right is worth a little care because they are expensive to change. A slug is part of the URL, and changing a published URL costs you the accumulated links and rankings unless you set up a redirect. Shorter is generally better: strip filler words and keep the two or three terms that describe the page.

How it works

Using the Text to URL Slug Generator

1Paste the title or phrase you want to convert.
2The text is lowercased, since URLs are conventionally lowercase and some servers treat cases differently.
3Spaces become hyphens, the separator Google explicitly recommends over underscores.
4Ampersands are expanded to 'and', then remaining unsafe characters are removed.
5Repeated hyphens are collapsed to one, and the finished slug is ready to copy.

Use cases

What people use it for

Creating a permalink for a new blog post or product page
Generating consistent, safe filenames from document titles
Building anchor IDs for headings in long documentation pages
Batch-normalising imported category names before a site migration

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

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