RunTheTests
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URL Slug Checker / Cleaner

Turn any text into a clean, URL-safe slug.

What you provide

Result

Done

Converted to a URL-safe slug.

Result
hello-world-cafe-review
Diagnostic telemetry
Output length
23 chars
Lines
1

What this cannot tell you

  • A pure text operation that runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Take this with you

How this calculation works

The text is lowercased, accented characters are reduced to their base letters, and every run of non-alphanumeric characters becomes a single hyphen — producing a slug that is safe and readable in a URL.

What the results mean

Accent folding
"Café" becomes "cafe", so the slug is plain ASCII and works everywhere.
Single hyphens
Runs of spaces and symbols collapse to one hyphen, with none left dangling at the ends.
Stop words kept
Short words like "a" and "the" are left in place. Stripping them was a 2010s SEO habit with no measurable benefit, and it regularly turns a readable slug into a cryptic one.
Length
Nothing is truncated for you. Slugs that run past roughly five or six words get cut in search results and shared links, but where to cut is an editorial choice rather than an algorithmic one.

Common problems and fixes

Changing a slug broke every existing link to the page
A slug is part of the URL, so editing it on a published page is a move rather than an edit — every existing link, bookmark and search result now points at nothing. If the page has been live and indexed, either keep the old slug or publish a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. The redirect is what passes accumulated ranking value across; without it you are starting the page from zero.
Two different titles produced the same slug
Punctuation and case are discarded, so "Design: A Primer" and "Design — a primer" both reduce to design-a-primer. Most systems then either overwrite the first page or append a numeric suffix, and neither is what you want. Check for a collision before publishing and disambiguate in the slug deliberately rather than letting the system pick.
Non-Latin text came back empty or mangled
Accent folding handles Latin scripts by reducing characters to their base letters, and it has nothing sensible to do with Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or CJK — those either transliterate poorly or drop out entirely. For non-Latin content, either transliterate deliberately with a tool built for that script, or use percent-encoded Unicode in the URL, which modern browsers display correctly.

Frequently asked questions

Why strip accents?

Because a slug should be predictable and typeable. Accented and non-ASCII characters can be percent-encoded into unreadable URLs, so folding them to base letters keeps the slug clean and shareable.

Should I put keywords in the slug?

Include the words that genuinely describe the page, which usually means the title reduced to its essentials. Beyond that the returns are small and the risk is real: a slug stuffed with repeated terms reads as spam to people deciding whether to click, and the URL is visible in every search result. Clear and short beats comprehensive.

Hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Search engines have long treated a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so red_shoes can be read as a single token where red-shoes is two words. It is one of the few URL conventions with a clear, long-standing and unambiguous answer.

Does the slug need to match the page title exactly?

No, and it often should not. Titles carry punctuation, subtitles and brand names that add length without adding clarity to a URL. A slug derived from the meaningful part of the title is easier to read, survives a title edit without breaking links, and is what most publishing systems generate by default for exactly these reasons.

Put this on your own site

Free to embed, no attribution required beyond the source link the frame carries itself. It runs entirely in your visitor's browser, sets no cookies and loads no third-party script.

Embed code
<iframe src="https://runthetests.com/embed/url-slug-checker/" width="100%" height="560" style="border:1px solid #e5e5e5;border-radius:8px" title="URL Slug Checker / Cleaner" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Preview it at https://runthetests.com/embed/url-slug-checker/. Embedded pages are marked noindex, so yours stays the canonical copy — not this one.

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