Clean URLs improve user experience, click-through rates, and search engine ranking. They are easier to share, remember, and avoid encoding issues. A well-crafted slug contains relevant keywords, helping both humans and bots understand the page content.

The tool first decomposes accented letters (NFD), removes diacritical marks, and then strips any character that is not a letter, digit, or chosen separator. Remaining whitespace and invalid sequences are replaced with the selected separator. Emoji, punctuation, and most symbols are removed to keep the slug clean.

Hyphens (-) are the standard recommended by Google because they act as word separators. Underscores (_) are sometimes used in programming contexts, while dots (.) and tildes (~) are rare and may cause confusion. For SEO, always prefer hyphens.

Pure client-side transliteration of complex scripts (CJK, Cyrillic, etc.) requires extensive dictionaries and is not fully implemented here. This tool excels at Latin-based text (with diacritics) and basic punctuation cleaning. For full multilingual slug generation, consider using server-side libraries or APIs that support proper transliteration.

This tool generates a base slug. In a CMS or web application, you should append a unique identifier or number if the same slug already exists. Most systems handle this automatically by adding "-1", "-2", etc.