How to Write Clean URL Slugs for Blog Posts

A slug is the last part of a web address, the bit after the final slash. For this post it is how-to-write-clean-url-slugs. You usually pick it once, in a hurry, just before you press publish, and then it sits in search results and shared links for years.

That is why it is worth five minutes. We pasted twelve real headings into the Text to Slug tool, tried every setting, and wrote down what came out. Most results were exactly what you would want. A few were not, and those are the ones worth knowing about.

What a good slug looks like

Short, lowercase, readable by a person, and separated with hyphens. Google's own URL guidance recommends hyphens over underscores because it reads a hyphen as a word break. The usual advice is to drop filler words if the meaning survives, and to keep the main topic near the front.

• Title: 10 Best Budget Laptops for Students (2026 Edition)
• Slug the tool gave us: 10-best-budget-laptops-for-students-2026-edition
• Slug you might actually publish: budget-laptops-for-students

The tool does the mechanical part: lowercase, symbols out, spaces turned into hyphens. Shortening it is a human job, and it is a good habit. A year from now you will not want "2026-edition" sitting in a link you cannot change without a redirect.

How to use the tool

Paste your title into the box. Each line becomes its own slug, so you can paste a whole list of headings and get a list back. Three settings sit beside it: a separator (hyphen, underscore or none), a Lowercase tick box, and a box called Keep Unicode letters. The result updates as you type, so you can flip a setting and see the difference straight away.

Hyphen is the sensible default for web pages. Underscore is handy for file names or database keys. "None" glues everything together, so Crème brûlée becomes cremebrulee, which is rarely what you want in a URL.

What surprised us in the test

Apostrophes turn into hyphens. Café Crème & Crêpes: A Beginner's Guide came out as cafe-creme-crepes-a-beginner-s-guide. Accents were handled nicely and the ampersand simply vanished, but the apostrophe was treated like a space and left a stray "s" hanging off the end. Don't Panic! It's Only a 404 became don-t-panic-it-s-only-a-404. It still works as a link, it just looks clumsy. Delete the apostrophe in your title first (Beginners Guide) and you get beginners-guide.

Some letters are dropped instead of converted. The tool strips accents from letters like é, ü and ô correctly. Letters that are not an accent on top of a plain letter are different. Straße nach Zürich gave stra-e-nach-zurich, and Łódź and Øresund gave odz-and-resund. If your title has ß, ł or ø, type the plain-letter version yourself (Strasse) before converting.

Symbols carry meaning, and the tool removes it. C++ vs C# vs F#: Which to Learn? became c-vs-c-vs-f-which-to-learn. Three languages collapsed into a slug that reads like a typing mistake. Price: $5 -> €5 / £4 turned into price-5-5-4. Spell it out first: cpp-vs-csharp-vs-fsharp is uglier on screen and far more useful. The same goes for prices: if the currency matters, write "usd" or "euro" in the title instead of relying on a symbol.

None of this is a fault in the idea of a slug generator. Every tool has to decide what to do with characters it does not know, and this one decides to drop them. The trick is knowing that before you paste the result into your CMS.

Slugs in Urdu and other non-Latin scripts

With the default settings, a headline written in Urdu comes out as nothing but its numbers. We tried پاکستان کا بجٹ 2026 and got 2026, because every letter fell outside the plain a-z range. Ticking Keep Unicode letters fixes that, and the same headline becomes پاکستان-کا-بجٹ-2026.

Is that a good slug? It depends on your audience. Search engines can read non-Latin URLs, and a reader in Karachi may like seeing a link in their own script. The catch is copying: depending on the app, a pasted link may appear as a long string of percent signs and hex codes. It still works, it just looks messy. For a mixed-language audience that shares links a lot, a short English slug plus an Urdu page title is a practical pairing. If your site is aimed at Urdu readers, keeping the letters is perfectly reasonable. Pick one approach and stay with it across the site.

The same box matters for accents. Tick it and Café Crème keeps its accents (café-crème) instead of becoming cafe-creme. For an English-language site, leave it off.

Mistakes to avoid

• Changing a slug after publishing. Without a redirect, the old link can break for anyone who saved or shared it. If you must change it, set up a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one.
• Stuffing keywords. best-cheap-budget-laptops-for-students-cheap-2026 looks spammy to people and does nothing clever for search.
• Using dates when you don't need to. A year in the slug dates the post and tempts you to republish under a new address.
• Duplicate slugs. Two posts titled "Getting Started" will want the same address. Add a word that tells them apart, such as the product name.
• Never reading the result. The oddities above only show up if you look. Read the slug once before you paste it.

Handy extras

• Need consistent capitalisation in the headline itself? Our guide to title case and sentence case covers it, and the Case Converter does the conversion.
• Not sure what a strange character in your title actually is? The Unicode Inspector shows its code point.
• Replacing apostrophes across a long list of titles is quicker with Find and Replace before you convert.

One side note: Text to Slug produces plain text, which you can copy or download as a .txt file. On Toolysite, images and PDFs downloaded as a guest or on the free plan carry a small Toolysite watermark; paid plans do not.

Frequently asked questions

Should a slug keep apostrophes?

No. Leave them out. This tool turns an apostrophe into a hyphen, which gives results like beginner-s, so remove the apostrophe from your title (or edit the slug) before you publish.

Why did my accented letters disappear or change?

With Keep Unicode letters switched off, letters with an accent mark, like é or ü, become plain e and u. Letters such as ß, ł and ø are separate characters, not an accent on another letter, so the tool drops them. Type the plain-letter spelling instead.

Can I use Urdu or Arabic letters in a URL?

Yes, tick Keep Unicode letters and the tool keeps them. Search engines can read such URLs. Be aware that copied links may show as encoded text with percent signs. They still work, but they look messy in messages.

What happens if two posts end up with the same slug?

Most publishing systems add a number to the second one (such as -2) or refuse to save it. Better to add a distinguishing word yourself so each address says what the page is about.