Article Slug Generator bishal-biswas.github.io | Bishal Biswas

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Article Slug Generator

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Turn any headline into a clean URL slug

A slug is the human-readable tail of a URL - the how-to-install-mongodb-vps inexample.com/articles/how-to-install-mongodb-vps. This article slug generatortakes a title, lowercases it, strips punctuation and accents, joins the words with hyphens and drops the filler words that add length without adding meaning. Paste one title or a hundred; everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

What are stop words, and do they hurt SEO?

Stop words are the high-frequency connective words a search engine can safely ignore: a, an, the, of, in, on, for, with, is, are, to. Leaving them in a URL will not get you penalised - Google's own guidance treats the URL as a minor ranking signal, and its crawlers parsethe-best-way-to-learn-html perfectly well.

The reason to strip them anyway is everything around the ranking:

  • Keyword prominence - a short slug puts your actual topic at the front, where both readers and search engines weigh it most.
  • Readability in results - Google truncates long URLs in the SERP, and a truncated URL is a weaker click signal.
  • Shareability - shorter links survive being pasted into chat, slides and print without wrapping or breaking.
  • Consistency - a rule applied by a tool beats a rule applied by hand at 11pm.

So: worth doing, not worth agonising over. If dropping a word makes the slug read strangely, keep it.

The words this tool keeps on purpose

Most slug generators strip how, what, why and whenalong with everything else. That is usually a mistake. Those words are the search query for informational content - people type "how to install mongodb", not "install mongodb" - and a slug that mirrors the query is easier to scan in a list of results. This tool leaves them alone unless you tick the second box.

Negations are protected for a blunter reason: not, no and withoutreverse the meaning of a title. "Why You Should Not Use jQuery" must never becomewhy-you-should-use-jquery.

What the generator does to your title

  1. Normalises accented characters - Café Décor becomes cafe-decor, not caf-dcor.
  2. Expands & into and - which then drops out as a stop word unless you untick the box.
  3. Deletes apostrophes without leaving a gap, so developer's becomes developers rather than developer-s.
  4. Replaces every remaining run of punctuation, symbols and whitespace with a single separator.
  5. Removes stop words - unless that would empty the slug, in which case it keeps them.
  6. Applies your word limit, lowercases everything, and trims stray separators from both ends.

Slug rules worth following

  • Hyphens, never underscores. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so web_design can be read as one token.
  • Lowercase only. Some servers treat /My-Post and /my-post as different URLs, which splits your ranking signals between two pages.
  • Aim for three to six words. Long enough to describe the page, short enough to survive truncation.
  • Lead with the primary keyword. It is the first thing read on both sides of the search box.
  • Leave dates out unless the page really is tied to a year. /best-laptops-2024 looks stale in 2026 even after you update the article.
  • Do not edit a published slug casually. Changing it creates a new URL and drops every link and ranking pointed at the old one. If you must, set up a 301 redirect.

Examples

  • "The Ultimate Guide to CSS Grid for Beginners" → ultimate-guide-css-grid-beginners
  • "How to Install MongoDB on a VPS in 2026" → how-install-mongodb-vps-2026
  • "What's the Difference Between HTML Elements and Attributes?" → whats-difference-html-elements-attributes
  • "10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Learning React" → 10-things-wish-knew-learning-react

Writing the article next?

Once the slug is settled, the SEO article writer scores the draft itself - keyword density, headings, readability. For the rest of the URL, theURL encoder and decoder handles query strings and percent-encoding.

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