URL slug generator — SEO-friendly slugs for Shopify

Quick answer: paste a title and copy the slug. Accents are transliterated (é → e), punctuation is dropped, spaces become hyphens, and the result is checked against Shopify's handle rules. Nothing is sent anywhere.

What the tool does to your title

1. Decomposes and strips accents — Céramique becomes ceramique. Non-ASCII characters are legal in a URL but get percent-encoded, so /products/céramique travels as /products/c%C3%A9ramique the moment anyone pastes it.
2. Handles ligatures explicitly — ß → ss, æ → ae, ø → o. Plain accent-stripping drops these entirely, which silently mangles German and Scandinavian titles.
3. Drops apostrophes without leaving a gap — women's becomes womens, not women-s.
4. Collapses everything else to single hyphens and trims them from both ends.

Hyphens, not underscores

Google reads a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner. blue_suede_shoes can be interpreted as one token; blue-suede-shoes is reliably three words. This has been consistent guidance for long enough that there is no remaining argument for underscores in a public URL.

Changing a slug on a live page

This is where slugs stop being cosmetic. Change a URL and the old one 404s. Every backlink, bookmark and accumulated ranking signal pointing at it is lost — unless a 301 redirect carries them to the new URL.

On Shopify: Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects, created as part of the change. A handle edit is one click; the redirect is a separate screen, and the gap between them is where the damage happens. Shopify URL redirects covers the mechanics, including the bulk CSV path when you are restructuring a whole collection.

The honest default: if a page has any traffic or any links, leave the slug alone. A slightly awkward URL costs you almost nothing. A broken one costs you everything that pointed at it.

Shopify handle specifics

Shopify derives the handle from the title when a resource is first saved, then freezes it. Renaming a product later does not update its handle — which is usually what you want, and is occasionally surprising when a product's URL still reflects a name from two seasons ago.

Handles must be unique within their resource type. Save a second product with a colliding handle and Shopify appends -1, which is how /products/ceramic-mug-1 appears in catalogues. Worth watching for when importing.