Slug generator

What does the slug generator do, and who is it for?

A slug is the part of a URL that names the page, such as url-slug-guide in /blog/url-slug-guide/. The tool converts any title into a readable, lower-case slug that contains only a-z, 0-9 and hyphens.

It is built for editors working in WordPress, WooCommerce or a custom CMS, shop teams converting product names, and developers preparing redirect lists. On Turkish or mixed-language sites it avoids a common library bug that turns İ into i plus a combining dot (U+0307) or drops ı.

How to use it

1. In single mode, type a title; the slug updates 150 ms after you stop typing.
2. Choose the language rules: English for English copy, Turkish for Turkish text so I and İ are lower-cased correctly.
3. Optionally enable stop-word removal and a length limit between 10 and 200 characters.
4. For many titles, switch to bulk mode, enter one title per line and press “Generate slugs”.
5. Copy the result or download it as TXT or CSV.

When the input is invalid, an old result is never shown as if it were current; the copy and download buttons are disabled.

Conversion table and rules

The pipeline always runs in the same order. Text is normalised to Unicode NFC and lower-cased with the selected language rules. In Turkish, İ becomes i and I becomes ı; because this happens before transliteration, IĞDIR correctly becomes igdir.

Next, the Turkish letters ç ğ ı ö ş ü map to c g i o s u, and Latin accents such as é are decomposed and stripped. Apostrophes inside a word are removed, so possessives stay in one piece. Every remaining run of characters that are not letters or digits becomes a single hyphen, and leading or trailing hyphens are trimmed.

Characters these rules cannot represent, such as Cyrillic, Arabic or emoji, are never silently “transliterated”. If some are dropped you see a warning; if nothing is left, you get an empty-slug error.

Bulk mode

In bulk mode each line is a separate source. Blank lines are skipped, but row numbers match your original text, so a failing row is easy to find. Up to 500 non-empty rows of 1,000 characters each are processed; if you go over, nothing is silently cut and an explicit error appears.

The TXT export lists valid slugs one per line. The CSV export contains row, source, slug and status columns, and cells that start with =, +, - or @ are prefixed with an apostrophe so a spreadsheet does not run them as formulas.

Stop-word removal

Words like “the”, “and” or “for” lengthen a URL without adding much meaning. Removal is off by default because they sometimes matter. When enabled, only whole tokens are removed: “the” goes, “theory” stays. If every word is a stop word, the text is kept rather than producing an empty slug.

Collisions

Different titles such as A B and A-B can end up as the same slug, a-b. The tool marks these rows as collisions but never appends -2 on its own. You decide which page owns the address; an arbitrary suffix gives readers and search engines a meaningless URL.

Worked example

Suppose you paste these three lines into bulk mode:

The Complete Guide to Café Marketing
Rock’n’Roll Guide
The complete guide to cafe marketing

With stop-word removal enabled, rows one and three both become complete-guide-cafe-marketing, so both are flagged as a collision and neither gets a number. Row two becomes rocknroll-guide because the in-word apostrophes are removed. With a length limit of 20, row one is cut at the last whole word to complete-guide-cafe, and a warning says it was shortened.

Changing permalinks and redirects

The cleanest approach is to settle the slug before publishing. If you change the permalink of a live page, the old address returns 404 and existing links and search listings point nowhere. Set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one; the .htaccess redirect generator can build the rules from a list.

Limits and common mistakes

• The tool creates only the last URL segment; the domain, folders and trailing / depend on your site structure.
• Picking English rules for Turkish text treats I as i instead of ı; results are usually the same, but the stop-word list changes.
• Repeating a keyword in the slug does not improve rankings by itself; a short, descriptive slug is enough.
• The tool does not check whether a slug already exists on your site; it only sees collisions within the list you enter.