Slugify URL

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page — the "best-bmi-calculator-2026" in example.com/blog/best-bmi-calculator-2026. Search engines display the URL (or a shortened version of it) directly in search results alongside the title and description, and both Google's own SEO guidance and long-standing practitioner consensus agree that a short, descriptive, keyword-relevant slug is a small but genuine ranking and click-through signal — it gives both crawlers and humans an immediate, scannable sense of what the page is about before anyone reads a word of its content. This tool builds on the same core text-to-slug transformation used throughout this site (lowercase conversion, diacritic stripping via Unicode NFD normalisation, and collapsing non-alphanumeric characters into a single separator) but adds three features specifically aimed at producing SEO-quality slugs rather than a generic text-to-slug conversion of arbitrary text. This is a deliberate difference from the Text & Writing category's Text to Slug tool, which converts any text — a filename, a tag, a code identifier — into a safe slug format with no SEO-specific opinions about length or word choice. This tool exists because a slug destined for a real, indexed URL has different constraints than a generic identifier: it should be short (Google's own guidance and most SEO practitioners recommend keeping slugs concise, generally well under 60-70 characters, since very long URLs are both harder to read and are truncated in search results), it should avoid diluting keyword relevance with low-value filler words, and it benefits from being previewed as an actual URL, not just as a bare string. The stopword removal toggle strips common English filler words — articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), and short prepositions (of, in, on, at, to, for, with) — that add length to a slug without adding topical signal; "The Best BMI Calculator for 2026" becomes "the-best-bmi-calculator-for-2026" with stopwords kept, but tightens to "best-bmi-calculator-2026" with them removed, a meaningfully shorter and more keyword-dense result for the same title. This is a stylistic choice some SEO practitioners follow and others skip — stopword removal is not a documented Google ranking factor by itself, but a shorter, cleaner slug is generally considered good practice regardless, which is why the toggle defaults to on but stays fully optional. The max-length control truncates a slug at a chosen character limit without ever cutting a word in half — it finds the last separator at or before the limit and trims there, so a 65-character slug capped at 60 characters comes out as a complete, readable phrase rather than ending mid-word with an orphaned syllable. The full-URL preview (yourdomain.com/{slug}) exists because a slug is never actually used in isolation — it always sits inside a larger URL structure, and seeing it in that context makes length and readability issues far more obvious than staring at the bare slug string alone. As with all slug generation, remember that changing a URL after a page has already been indexed and linked to elsewhere can cost you existing search rankings and break inbound links unless you set up a proper 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one — decide on a slug before publishing wherever practical, rather than optimising it after the fact.