Text to Slug Generator

What Is a URL Slug?

A URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page in a human-readable format. In the URL https://toolscourt.com/blog/what-is-a-cron-expression, the slug is what-is-a-cron-expression. Slugs replace spaces with hyphens, remove special characters, and use lowercase letters to create URLs that are readable, memorable, and SEO-friendly.

Slug Best Practices for SEO

• Use hyphens, not underscores: Google treats hyphens as word separators. word-counter is indexed as two words; word_counter is indexed as one word.
• Keep it short: Aim for 3–5 words. Long slugs are truncated in search results and harder to share.
• Include the primary keyword: The slug is one of the strongest on-page SEO signals. Put your main keyword in the slug.
• Remove stop words: Words like "a", "the", "and", "of" add length without SEO value. "what-is-cron-expression" is better than "what-is-a-cron-expression".
• Use lowercase only: URLs are case-sensitive on most servers. Uppercase in slugs creates duplicate content risks.
• Avoid dates unless necessary: "guide-to-jwt" ages better than "2024-guide-to-jwt".

Unicode and International Slugs

Hindi titles like "क्रोन एक्सप्रेशन जनरेटर" cannot be used directly in URLs without percent-encoding, which produces ugly URLs like %E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0.... The standard approach for non-Latin titles is transliteration — converting characters to their closest ASCII equivalents — followed by standard slug processing. Our tool uses Unicode NFD normalisation to decompose characters and remove diacritical marks, producing clean ASCII slugs from titles in any language.