Text to Slug: Frequently Asked Questions

Lowercase letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), and hyphens (-) are safe in all contexts. Underscores are technically allowed but not recommended for SEO. All other characters should be avoided or percent-encoded, which makes URLs unreadable.

Hyphens. Google treats hyphens as word separators, meaning it parses 'chocolate-cake' as two separate words. Underscores were historically not treated as word separators by Google, so 'chocolate_cake' was treated as one word. Current Google guidance and all major style guides recommend hyphens.

Aim for under 60 characters. Slugs of 3–5 words (20–40 characters) are ideal. Longer slugs look unwieldy in search results and when shared. Very short slugs (1-2 words) may not be descriptive enough.

Generally yes, especially for very long titles. Removing a, the, and, or, in, on, at, to, for, of reduces length without losing meaning. However, use judgment — 'how-to-do-x' reads more naturally than 'how-do-x', so keeping 'to' is reasonable.

The converter replaces accented characters with their nearest ASCII equivalent (é → e, ü → u, ñ → n). This is standard practice for English-language URLs and ensures maximum compatibility.

Yes, but you should set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one to preserve SEO value, avoid broken links, and prevent 404 errors for people who bookmarked the old URL. Choose slugs carefully the first time.

The converter removes non-Latin characters. Modern browsers can display percent-encoded Unicode in URLs, but these URLs are unreadable when shared as text. For multilingual sites, either use transliteration or include the Latin slug alongside the localised slug.