Slug Generator

A slug is the readable last segment of a URL. The page at /blog/best-coffee-grinder has the slug best-coffee-grinder. WordPress calls the same value the post name, Shopify uses a handle, and most other CMSs use one of those two words for it.

It ends up in three places a reader and a crawler both see: the address bar, internal links, and the sitemap. That makes it a small but durable decision — it is part of the URL for as long as the page exists, which is exactly why changing one later is a redirect job rather than an edit.

Letters with diacritics are folded rather than dropped: Café Münster becomes cafe munster. A handful of letters that Unicode cannot decompose are transliterated, so Straße gives strasse and Ærø gives aero instead of losing characters entirely.

Everything else that is not a letter, digit or your separator becomes a word break, which means apostrophes and hyphens inside a title do not produce double separators. A literal & is treated as a break too, so Tips & Tricks yields tips-tricks rather than tips-tricks with an encoded ampersand in the path.

The stop-word variant removes common words such as the, and, of, is, for and to before building the slug. The list is short on purpose: a broader list strips words that carry real intent, and a slug that has lost its meaning ranks no better than the full one.

Both forms work. A full slug like how-to-choose-the-right-coffee-grinder is descriptive and safe; the stop-word form choose-right-coffee-grinder is shorter and easier to scan. Either is fine as long as it is consistent across the site.

The default cap is 80 characters, comfortably inside what search engines display and what most CMSs accept. Because slugs are truncated from the right, a long title loses its tail — often the part carrying the specific detail, which is usually the part worth keeping.

That is why the 30-character and first-three-words variants are included: they show the trade-off explicitly instead of letting a cut land mid-word. If a slug is being truncated, the fix is usually a shorter title, not a longer allowance.

Hyphens are the default and the safer default. WordPress generates them, most static site generators expect them, and an underscore has a long history of being read as a literal character in file names rather than as a separator.

Underscores are available because some systems, particularly older database-backed setups, already use them in existing URLs. Consistency matters more than the choice: switching separators halfway through a site leaves you maintaining two conventions for no benefit.

Editable, but not free. A slug is a URL other people may have bookmarked, linked to or printed, so changing it needs a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one. The redirect preserves whatever authority the old URL had accumulated.

Without the redirect the page is simply gone from the old address, and any inbound links become 404s. If a slug must change, change it, add the redirect in the same edit, and update the sitemap — all three together.