Updated · Built and checked by the PlinzoTools team, formulas tested against published sources
Clean up a messy URL slug -- lowercase, hyphen-separated, no special characters.
Your cleaned slug will appear here.
This tool cleans up an existing, messy URL slug -- lowercasing everything, turning spaces into hyphens, collapsing repeated hyphens, and deleting every other character (underscores, slashes, punctuation, and non-English letters are removed, not converted to hyphens) -- into a clean, SEO-friendly slug. An optional checkbox, off by default, also removes common stop words. If you're generating a brand-new slug from a title rather than cleaning an existing one, see the Slug Generator tool.
Paste your messy slug or URL path. The cleaned version appears instantly.
The tool applies a fixed sequence of changes, in this order:
Underscores are converted to hyphens, so two words joined by an underscore stay separate words in the slug.
A checkbox labelled to remove common stop words is off by default. When you turn it on, the cleaned slug is split at hyphens and any of these words are dropped: a, an, the, and, or, but, of, in, on, at, to, for, with, is, are. Only this short list is used. Removing them makes the address shorter, but it can also change the meaning or make it harder to read, so review the result before you use it.
Take the messy input /The--Best_Way to Learn!!. The steps produce: lowercase gives /the--best_way to learn!!, underscores become spaces, disallowed characters are deleted giving the--best way to learn, whitespace becomes a hyphen giving the--best-way-to-learn, and collapsing hyphens gives the-best-way-to-learn. With the stop word option on, the words the and to are removed, and the slug becomes best-way-learn.
Short, descriptive, lowercase slugs with hyphens between words are easy to read and share. Once a page is live and indexed, changing its slug changes its address, so put a permanent redirect from the old address to the new one and update internal links, otherwise visitors and search engines will hit an error page. Cleaning a slug before publishing is much safer than fixing it afterwards.
The tool cleans text only. It does not check whether the resulting slug is already used by another page on your site, and it runs locally in your browser without sending anything to a server.
The Slug Generator turns an arbitrary title/sentence into a new slug; this tool specifically cleans up an existing slug that already has some structure but messy characters/spacing.
Underscores are turned into hyphens, so the words stay separate. Other symbols are removed.
Accented Latin letters are converted to plain letters (café becomes cafe). Letters from other alphabets are removed, so transliterate them first if you need them kept.
When the option is on: a, an, the, and, or, but, of, in, on, at, to, for, with, is and are.
It is designed for a slug or a single path segment. Slashes and dots are deleted, so a full address will be merged into one string.
Reference: Google Search Central