How to Create a URL Slug

If you've ever copy-pasted a long blog post title into a URL field and watched it get auto-converted into something messy with %20s and uppercase letters, you already know why URL slug generation deserves its own short workflow. Done well, it takes five seconds. Done badly, it costs you click-through rate and occasionally tanks the page entirely.

This guide covers the manual six-step method (so you understand what's happening) and the one-paste shortcut (for when you just want it done).

The 5-second method

Open the URL slug generator, paste your title, copy the result. The tool runs all six normalization steps locally in your browser. Done.

If you want to understand what the generator is doing — or if you need to do this manually inside a CMS that doesn't have a good slug field — here's the full six-step workflow.

Step 1: Start with the page title

The title is your raw input. Don't rewrite it for the slug — that creates inconsistency between what users see in search results and what the URL says. The slug should be a compressed, normalized version of the title.

Example title: How to Make a Markdown Table in 60 Seconds (3 Easy Methods)

Step 2: Lowercase everything

Web servers commonly treat /My-Post and /my-post as different URLs. That splits link equity and creates duplicate content risk. Always lowercase.

After step 2: how to make a markdown table in 60 seconds (3 easy methods)

Step 3: Replace spaces with hyphens

Hyphens are Google's preferred URL word separator. They're cleaner than underscores (which Google treats as word joiners), and they don't get URL-encoded the way spaces do (which become ugly %20 sequences).

After step 3: how-to-make-a-markdown-table-in-60-seconds-(3-easy-methods)

Step 4: Strip stop words and special characters

Stop words (the, of, a, an, in, on, for, with, to) usually don't add ranking value. Removing them shortens the slug and concentrates the keyword signal. Also drop parentheses, brackets, quotes, em dashes, and other punctuation.

After step 4: how-make-markdown-table-60-seconds-3-easy-methods

Stop word judgment call

Sometimes a stop word is essential to the meaning. "War of the Worlds" loses identity if you strip it. "The Beatles" likewise. Use judgment: if the stop word is part of a recognized phrase, keep it. Otherwise, drop.

Step 5: Transliterate accented characters

Latin-script accented characters get URL-encoded into hex if you leave them in the slug. café becomes caf%C3%A9 in the URL bar — ugly, harder to share, and a small SEO drag. Always transliterate to ASCII equivalents.

Step 6: Cap at 60 characters without breaking words

Google truncates URLs in search results around 60 characters, so longer slugs get cut off mid-word. Trim from the end without breaking a word. Drop trailing trivial words ("methods", "guide", "tutorial") if you need to fit.

Final slug: how-make-markdown-table-60-seconds (35 characters)

Worked examples — five titles, five slugs

Skip the six steps — use the generator

The whole workflow takes five seconds in our URL slug generator. Paste the title, get the slug, copy. The tool handles lowercasing, hyphenation, stop-word stripping, transliteration of accented characters, and length capping in one operation. Nothing leaves your browser.

Edge cases the six-step method doesn't cover

The six steps work for ~90% of titles. The remaining 10% need judgment calls that no algorithm handles cleanly:

Brand names and proper nouns

"How to Use the Spotify API" → don't strip the brand. spotify-api-guide beats music-streaming-api-guide because users search the brand name directly. Branded slugs also benefit from existing entity recognition in Google's Knowledge Graph.

Acronyms and initialisms

Treat acronyms as single tokens. "What is API?" → what-is-api, not what-is-a-p-i. Lowercase them in the slug even though you'd capitalize them in prose. The exception is when the lowercase form clashes with a real word: iso-standards is fine; aws-pricing is fine; but be careful with three-letter initialisms that read as words when lowercased.

Numbers, hyphens, and dates

Years are good ("2026"). Counts in listicles are good ("7-rules", "10-tips"). Arbitrary post IDs are bad ("post-4729"). When the title has both a year and a list count ("10 SEO Tips for 2026"), keep both: seo-tips-2026 works because "10" without context adds nothing, but the year locks in the freshness signal.

Question titles

Question-form titles ("How does X work?", "Why is Y broken?") often rank for question-shaped queries — but the slug should drop the question word in most cases. how-react-fiber-works beats how-does-react-fiber-work for keyword density without losing search match. Exception: when the literal question is the highest-volume query, keep it ("how-to-fix-cors-error" gets searched verbatim millions of times).

Update or "version 2" titles

"How to Create a URL Slug (Updated 2026)" → don't put "updated" in the slug. Use the year alone: how-create-url-slug-2026. When you republish next year, you can either bump the slug (with a 301 from the old) or keep the old slug and update the title. Keeping the slug is usually right; rewriting it for every update creates redirect chains.

Multilingual sites

If you publish the same content in multiple languages, slug each version in its own language: /en/how-create-url-slug and /es/como-crear-url-slug. Then use hreflang annotations to tell Google they're translations of each other. Don't slug both pages in English; you lose the localized search signal.

For the underlying SEO theory and the seven rules of slug optimization, see URL Slug SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2026. For the question of which separator to use, see Dash vs Underscore in URL Slugs.