URL slug generator - turn titles into clean, SEO-friendly URLs

A slug is the readable last part of a URL that identifies a page: in example.com/blog/start-a-business the slug is start-a-business. The generator applies these steps:

1. transliterates accented and special letters (é → e, ü → u, ß → ss, ł → l),
2. replaces & with “and” and drops apostrophes,
3. converts to lowercase,
4. replaces spaces and punctuation with the separator and removes repeated or trailing separators,
5. optionally removes stop words and shortens the slug at a word boundary.

Example: “The 10 Best Cafés in Łódź!” → the-10-best-cafes-in-lodz.

• Hyphens, not underscores - Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, while an underscore can join words into one token.
• Short and focused - 3-5 words containing the main keyword, usually under 60-75 characters. Leave out dates if the content will be updated.
• Lowercase only - on many servers /Page and /page are different addresses, which leads to duplicate content.
• ASCII only - a URL with “é” or “ü” is technically valid, but when copied it turns into unreadable %C3%A9 sequences (see the URL encoder).
• Do not change published slugs - if you must, set up a 301 redirect from the old address, or you lose backlinks and rankings.

The stop-word option removes short function words such as a, an, the, of, in, to, and, for and with, e.g. “How to Start a Business in 2026? A Step-by-Step Guide” → how-start-business-2026-step-step-guide. Use it with care: in this example the result reads worse than the full version, and words like “how”, “not” or “best” stay because they change meaning and often appear in search queries. Readability for people matters more than saving a few characters.

The maximum length cuts at the last complete word, so a 30-character limit turns the title above into how-to-start-a-business-in instead of chopping a word in half.

For identifiers in code rather than URLs, the case converter produces camelCase, snake_case and other naming styles.