Tooltrusty

Text-to-Slug Converter

Turn a headline into the tidy, readable URL a search engine and a human can both parse.

0Characters
0Words in slug

Batch mode

Runs in your browser. Everything you type or load here is processed locally by JavaScript on this page. Nothing is uploaded to Tooltrusty or to any third party.

What the text-to-Slug Converter does

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL after the domain — the text-to-slug in this page's own address. Getting it right matters more than it looks: slugs appear in search results, they get pasted into chat and email, and once a page is indexed, changing one means setting up a redirect.

This converter takes a headline and applies the transformations a good slug needs, in order. It first normalises Unicode and strips diacritics, so Café becomes cafe rather than being dropped or percent-encoded into unreadable %C3%A9 noise. It handles the ligatures and special letters that decomposition alone misses — ß to ss, ø to o. It removes apostrophes without leaving a gap, so developer's becomes developers and not developer-s. Then it lowercases everything, replaces every remaining run of non-alphanumeric characters with a single separator, and trims separators from both ends.

Two options are judgement calls. Removing stop words produces shorter slugs (how-to-compress-images-browser instead of how-to-compress-images-in-the-browser), which some teams prefer; leaving them in reads more naturally. The length cap truncates at a word boundary rather than mid-word, and 60 characters is a reasonable default — long enough to be descriptive, short enough to survive being displayed in a search result. Hyphens are the recommended separator because search engines have long treated them as word boundaries while underscores were historically treated as joiners.

How to use it

  1. Type or paste your headline into the top field — the slug updates as you type.
  2. Adjust the separator, length cap and stop-word setting to match your site's conventions.
  3. Copy the slug, or paste a whole list of titles into batch mode to convert them all at once.

A worked example

Starting from a real headline with punctuation, an em dash and a year:

How to Compress Images in the Browser — A 2026 Guide!

With default settings you get:

how-to-compress-images-in-the-browser-a-2026-guide

Tick remove common stop words and it tightens to:

how-compress-images-browser-2026-guide

Both are valid. The first reads more like the headline and is easier to recognise when someone pastes the link; the second is shorter and keeps only the terms that carry meaning. Pick one convention and apply it consistently across the site — mixed conventions are worse than either choice on its own.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?

Hyphens. Google has stated for years that it treats hyphens as word separators in URLs and underscores as joiners, meaning image_tools may be read as a single token while image-tools is read as two words. Hyphens are also the near-universal convention, so links look normal to readers.

How long should a slug be?

Long enough to describe the page, short enough to stay readable. Somewhere between three and six meaningful words — roughly 40 to 60 characters — suits most pages. Overly long slugs get truncated in search results and are awkward to share.

What happens to accented and non-Latin characters?

Accented Latin characters are flattened to their base letters, so résumé becomes resume. Scripts with no Latin equivalent, such as Chinese or Arabic, have no safe transliteration and are removed — for those languages you will want a slug written directly in Latin characters.

Can I convert a whole list of titles at once?

Yes. Paste one title per line into the batch box and every line is converted with the same settings, ready to copy into a spreadsheet or CMS import.