URL Slug Generator: English & Spanish, Accent-Safe

When we build WordPress sites for bilingual businesses (a growing part of our client base in Utah), one of the small but consistent friction points is creating clean, consistent URL slugs for Spanish-language content. WordPress’s default slug generation handles Spanish accented characters poorly, and most online tools ignore Spanish stopwords entirely. This tool strips accents correctly (á→a, é→e, ñ→n), removes common stopwords in both English and Spanish, and outputs a slug ready to paste.

How to Use

• Paste your title (English or Spanish).
• Choose language mode (auto/es/en) and stopword removal.
• Copy the slug and use it as your page/post URL.

Why URL slugs matter for SEO

The URL slug is the part of a web address after the domain: yourdomain.com/web-design-salt-lake-city | web-design-salt-lake-city is the slug. Google reads the slug as a signal of page topic. A clean, keyword-rich slug reinforces what the page is about; a messy one (?p=1247 or /post-title-here-copy-3) dilutes that signal and looks unprofessional in search results.

The bilingual slug problem

Standard URL encoding handles accented characters by percent-encoding them: diseño becomes dise%C3%B1o in a URL. While browsers display these correctly, the encoded versions look broken when copied into chat or emails, perform inconsistently across older systems, and are difficult to remember or type. The correct approach is transliteration, converting á to a, é to e, ñ to n, before slugifying. This tool does that automatically for Spanish content.

What are stopwords and why remove them?

Stopwords are common function words that carry little semantic meaning in a URL: articles (a, an, the / el, la, los, las, un, una), prepositions (of, in, for / de, en, para), and conjunctions (and, or / y, o). Including them in a slug wastes the keyword signal and makes URLs longer without adding clarity.

English example: “The Best Web Design Agency in Salt Lake City” → best-web-design-agency-salt-lake-city (not the-best-web-design-agency-in-salt-lake-city)

Spanish example: “Los Mejores Servicios de Diseño Web en Utah” → mejores-servicios-diseno-web-utah

Slug best practices

Keep slugs short, under 5 words is ideal. Never use underscores (use hyphens: Google treats underscores as word-joiners, not separators). Always lowercase. Don’t include dates in slugs for evergreen content, they make URLs look outdated and force redirects when you update the post year.

FAQs

• Should URL slugs include the target keyword? Yes. The slug is one of the on-page signals Google uses to understand page topic. Include the primary keyword naturally, not stuffed. web-design-salt-lake-city is correct; web-design-web-design-slc-web-designer is not.
• Underscores or hyphens in URL slugs? Always hyphens. Google’s documentation explicitly states that hyphens are treated as word separators in URLs, while underscores join words together. web_design is read as one token “webdesign”; web-design is correctly read as two separate words.
• Should I change existing URL slugs to improve SEO? Only if you set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Changing a URL without a redirect destroys any backlinks pointing to the old URL and sends users and crawlers to a 404. The SEO value of the old URL only transfers fully if you redirect it immediately. For high-traffic pages, the risk of changing slugs usually isn’t worth the reward.
• How long should a URL slug be? As short as possible while still being descriptive. Most SEO best practice recommends under 60 characters for the full URL path. For the slug itself, 3–5 hyphen-separated words is ideal. Longer slugs don’t directly hurt rankings, but they’re harder to read, share, and type.
• Does this tool work for languages other than English and Spanish? The tool handles English and Spanish stopword removal and Spanish transliteration (accents and ñ). For other languages, set the language dropdown to “none”, the tool will still lowercase, strip special characters, and collapse hyphens, but won’t apply language-specific stopwords.

We build bilingual WordPress websites for Spanish and English-speaking businesses across Utah and the US, with proper URL structure, hreflang implementation, and bilingual SEO from the start.