URL Slug Cleaner

It takes an existing URL or slug — often messy, uppercase, or outdated — and analyzes it for SEO problems, then produces a clean, optimized version. Common fixes include lowercasing, replacing underscores with hyphens, collapsing double hyphens, stripping file extensions like .html, decoding percent-encoded characters, and removing stopwords. A heuristic score shows how SEO-friendly the result is.

The Slug Generator creates brand-new slugs from plain text or titles. The URL Slug Cleaner is for slugs you already have — typically copied from an old URL or CMS export — and it repairs and optimizes them in place, while telling you exactly what it found and what it changed.

Google and other search engines treat hyphens as word separators — my-great-post reads as three words. Underscores are treated as word joiners, so my_great_post reads as one long word, which weakens keyword signals. Google’s own SEO starter guide recommends hyphens for this reason.

Words like "the", "and", "of", and "for" rarely help a page rank — the keywords that matter are the descriptive ones. Removing them shortens the URL (which also displays better in search results) without hurting relevance. The cleaner always keeps the first word so the slug still starts with a strong keyword.

URLs are case-sensitive on many servers, so /My-Post and /my-post can be treated as different pages, splitting ranking signals and risking 404s. Lowercasing avoids case-duplicate URLs entirely. This tool also strips leading/trailing hyphens, which can break relative links when a URL is copied.

The score is a 0–100 heuristic, not a guarantee of rankings. It starts at 100 and deducts points for problems: hard errors like spaces or special characters lose the most, warnings like uppercase or double hyphens lose fewer, and informational items like stopwords lose a little. Very short, very long, or overly wordy slugs also lose a few points. Scores of 80+ indicate a solid, clean slug.

No. Everything — parsing, analysis, cleaning, and scoring — runs entirely in your browser with JavaScript. Nothing you paste is transmitted anywhere, so you can safely clean internal or pre-launch URLs.

The tool only shows you the improved slug — it never rewrites anything on your site. If you apply it, remember to set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so existing links, bookmarks, and search rankings keep working.