Turn titles into URL slugs

What happens to a title

Each line becomes one slug. Text Studio lowercases it, drops accents, spells out a few special letters, turns & into “and”, replaces everything that is not a to z or 0 to 9 with a hyphen, merges hyphens that end up side by side, and trims them off both ends:

The special letters are ß (ss), æ (ae), ø (o), œ (oe), ł (l), đ (d), þ (th) and the Turkish dotless ı (i). Two things need a hand. An apostrophe splits a word, so delete apostrophes first if you prefer dont-panic. And letters outside the Latin alphabet, such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese, are dropped, so a title written only in them gives an empty line: write it in Latin letters first.

What makes a good slug

Google's guidance on URLs asks for simple, descriptive words, with hyphens rather than underscores between them. Beyond that, a few habits help readers and search engines alike:

• Short and readable. how-to-make-sourdough-bread says as much as how-to-make-a-really-good-sourdough-bread-at-home.
• The words people search for, in the order they would type them. Keep small words when they carry meaning: how-to-cook-for-one says something cook-one does not.
• No dates if you plan to update the page; a year in the address ages badly.
• Lowercase only. Many web servers treat Page and page as two different addresses.
• Unique. Two pages cannot share an address; WordPress, for one, adds -2 to the second, which reads badly in a link.
• Stable. Once a page is live, changing its slug breaks links to it unless you redirect the old address to the new one.

Text Studio does not shorten slugs or drop small words on its own, so edit them in the page after converting.

url-slug or kebab-case?

Both are in the Case menu and both join words with hyphens, but they are built for different jobs. kebab-case is for code: it keeps accented letters and other alphabets, splits joined-up names (userName becomes user-name) and leaves & out. url-slug is for addresses and file names that must work everywhere: only a to z, 0 to 9 and hyphens survive, and userName becomes username.

Why strip accents at all, when browsers can show café in an address? Because a link that is copied or shared often travels in its encoded form, where é turns into %C3%A9, and a slug full of those is hard to read or type. The URL encoder in the Dev Toolbox shows exactly what a character becomes.

Making file names? Leave the extension off first. The dot before .jpg is not a to z either, so “Photo 2026 Summer.JPG” would become photo-2026-summer-jpg.

Slugs for a whole list

Paste a column of titles from a spreadsheet, turn them all into slugs at once, and paste the result back beside them. The lines stay in the same order and blank lines stay blank, so each slug lines up with its title.

Two different titles can produce the same slug: “Résumé tips” and “Resume Tips” both give resume-tips. To check a batch, run Remove duplicate lines on the slugs and watch the line count. If it drops, two of them clash; Ctrl Z brings the full list back so you can rename one.

Product catalogs are the classic batch, with sizes, percentages and brand marks in every name: “Socks, 3 Pack, 100% Cotton” becomes socks-3-pack-100-cotton. Watch for trademark signs, which are spelled out rather than dropped: “Octoolo™ Guide” comes out as octoolotm-guide, so delete the ™ first.