Slug Generator

A good slug is lowercase, hyphen-separated, free of stop words, and short enough to read at a glance. Hyphens rather than underscores is not a style preference — search engines treat hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners, so word_count reads as one token while word-count reads as two. Lowercase matters because URLs are case-sensitive after the domain on most servers, meaning /About and /about can serve as two distinct pages and split their own ranking signals.

The strongest rule is that slugs should almost never change once published. A changed slug breaks every existing inbound link, bookmark, and share unless a redirect is in place, and even a correct 301 loses a little authority and adds a hop. This is why it pays to strip dates, draft numbers, and volatile words like "new" or "2024" at creation time — they are exactly the parts that will make the URL feel stale later and tempt someone into renaming it.

Non-ASCII input is where slug generation gets genuinely tricky. Accented characters need transliteration rather than deletion — dropping the accent from a French or Romanian word usually produces the right result, while dropping the character entirely mangles it. Scripts without a Latin equivalent need either a romanisation scheme or percent-encoding, and encoded URLs are unreadable and awkward to share. Decide the policy once per site and apply it consistently rather than per article.