SEO tools
Slug Generator
Convert titles into clean, readable URL slugs. Accents, Cyrillic and Greek are transliterated rather than stripped, one slug per line for bulk work, and duplicate collisions are flagged.
One per line to convert many at once.
0 for no limit. Trimmed at a word boundary.
Optional, e.g. blog/ or 2026/
Slug
how-do-card-bins-work-a-beginner-s-guide-2026
Length
45 chars
Words
10
Transliteration examples
A slugifier that only strips non-ASCII would turn the last four of these into empty or mangled strings.
What makes a slug good
| Slug | Verdict |
|---|---|
| /how-card-bins-work | Readable, specific, short |
| /p?id=48213&cat=7 | Opaque — nothing to read or share |
| /how_card_bins_work | Underscores join words rather than separate them |
| /How-Card-BINs-Work | Mixed case invites duplicate URLs |
| /bin-lookup-bin-checker-bin-finder | Keyword stuffing in the URL |
Why transliteration is the hard part
Most slug functions are a one-line regex that deletes everything outside a-z0-9. That works for English and fails everywhere else. Unicode normalisation (NFD) fixes the common accents by splitting é into a plain e plus a combining mark that can then be dropped — but it does nothing for characters that are a single codepoint with no decomposed form. German ß, Nordic ø, Polish ł and Icelandic þ all survive NFD untouched and then get deleted, silently corrupting the word. Those need an explicit map, which is what the examples in the tool demonstrate.
Related tools
- Redirect Checker — changing a slug means a 301; check it resolves in one hop.
- SERP Preview — see the slug in place as a breadcrumb in the result.
- Sitemap Generator — collect the finished URLs into a sitemap.
Frequently asked questions
Hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so card_bin_lookup can be read as a single token while card-bin-lookup is read as three words. This has been Google's stated position for years and there is no upside to underscores in a URL.
Does the URL slug affect rankings?
Very slightly, and mostly indirectly. Google has described URL words as a small ranking factor. The larger benefits are that a readable slug shows in the search result and in shared links, and that it survives being pasted into plain text without turning into an opaque string of IDs.
How long should a slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance — three to five meaningful words is a good target. There is no penalty for a long slug, but very long ones get truncated in search results and are unpleasant to share. Dropping stopwords is a reasonable way to shorten, provided the result still reads naturally.
What happens to accented and non-Latin characters?
They are transliterated or preserved, never silently deleted. Naive slugifiers strip anything non-ASCII, which turns Müller into mller and reduces a Cyrillic or Greek title to an empty slug. This tool decomposes accents with Unicode NFD, maps the characters that have no decomposed form (ß, ø, ł, æ, þ) explicitly, and transliterates Cyrillic and Greek — Ελληνικά becomes ellinika, Йошкар-Ола becomes yoshkar-ola. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are a different case: there is no one-to-one romanisation that round-trips, so those characters are kept as they are rather than guessed at or dropped. 北京 travel guide gives 北京-travel-guide, which is a valid URL and what Wikipedia does too.
Can I use non-ASCII characters directly in a URL?
Technically yes — internationalised URLs are valid and browsers display them decoded. In practice they are percent-encoded on the wire, so a Russian slug becomes an unreadable string when copied into an email or a chat. Transliteration is usually the safer choice unless your audience is entirely in one non-Latin script.
Should I change the slug of an existing page?
Only with a good reason, and always with a 301 redirect from the old URL. Changing a slug resets the page's accumulated signals unless the redirect is in place, and any external links pointing at the old address will 404 without it.