Zellio.io

Slug / URL Encoder

Clean broken URLs or turn any title into a safe URL slug.

Runs locallyWorks offlineShare link carries settings, never your data
Send output toBase64 Encode / DecodeCode FormatterRegex Tester & BuilderBuild a workflow from thisOutput stays on this page until you send it.

Frequently asked questions

What is a URL slug?

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a page — usually the title in lowercase with spaces replaced by hyphens and special characters removed. For example, an article titled 'My First Blog Post' becomes my-first-blog-post, and a product called 'Blue Running Shoes' becomes blue-running-shoes. Slugs form the permanent permalink of a page and are used in content management systems to create readable URLs instead of numeric IDs. Good slugs improve both user experience (people can guess page URLs) and search engine optimization (keywords in the URL help with ranking).

Why do clean slugs matter for SEO?

Readable, keyword-relevant slugs help users and search engines understand a page at a glance and tend to earn slightly better click-through than opaque IDs. Search engines weight keywords in URLs as a minor ranking factor, so a slug containing your target keyword gives a small SEO boost. Users are also more likely to click on a readable URL like example.com/how-to-bake-bread than example.com/?id=12345, and they're more likely to remember and share URLs that make sense. Clean slugs also make your links more trustworthy in emails and documents, since recipients can see what the page is about before clicking.

Is my input uploaded?

No. Everything runs locally in your browser using standard web APIs — your text, files and inputs are never uploaded to a server, so the tool works even offline once the page has loaded.

Can I encode and decode URLs?

Yes. The tool handles URL-safe encoding of special characters (spaces become %20, ampersands become %26, etc.), and decodes percent-encoded URLs back to readable text. This is useful when working with query parameters or debugging URLs that have been encoded for transmission through web protocols. URL encoding ensures special characters are safely transmitted without breaking the URL structure, and decoding lets you read what parameters a URL actually contains without the encoding noise.

Pro tips

  • Decide the slug before publishing. Changing it afterwards breaks every existing link unless you also add and maintain a redirect.
  • Use hyphens rather than underscores — underscores can be hidden by a text underline, and search engines have long treated hyphens as the word separator.
  • Strip filler words but keep the meaningful ones; a slug should still be readable as a description of the page.
  • Avoid dates in slugs for evergreen content, or the URL will make an updated page look stale.
  • Transliterate accented characters rather than percent-encoding them, so the link stays readable when pasted into plain text.

About Slug / URL Encoder

Two related jobs in one place: turning a headline into a permalink that will not break, and repairing a URL whose spaces, accents or ampersands have already been mangled. Handy for CMS imports and file naming, where one stray character costs an afternoon.

Turn any title or heading into a clean, URL-safe slug, or encode and decode URLs that contain spaces and special characters. Good slugs are lowercase, hyphenated and free of punctuation, which makes links readable and friendlier for search engines.

Use it for permalinks, file names, anchor links and anywhere else that needs a tidy, shareable string. Getting it right before publishing matters, because changing a slug afterwards breaks every link already pointing at it.

A good slug is lowercase, hyphen-separated and free of anything that needs escaping, because URLs may only contain a restricted ASCII set and everything else has to be percent-encoded. That is why a space becomes %20 and why a title with an accent or an ampersand produces a link that is ugly, fragile and easy to break when it is copied into an email or a chat message that re-encodes it.

Slug choices are close to permanent, which is the part worth pausing over. Every link, bookmark and search result pointing at a page uses its slug, so changing one breaks all of them unless a redirect is put in place — and redirects accumulate as maintenance debt. Two conventions help: leave dates out unless the content is genuinely time-bound, and drop filler words rather than the words carrying meaning, so a long headline becomes a short slug that still says what the page is.

Common use cases

  • Turning an article headline into a permalink before publishing in a CMS.
  • Cleaning a batch of titles into consistent slugs during a content migration.
  • Repairing a URL that arrived with spaces or accented characters already mangled.
  • Producing safe file names from titles for downloads or exports.
  • Creating anchor identifiers for headings within a long document.
How it comparesMost CMS platforms generate a slug automatically from the title, and their handling of accents, punctuation and stop words varies enough to be worth checking. This is useful before the content exists, or when you want a different slug from the one the CMS proposes.