Title to URL Converter

From headline to URL: the transformation in detail

Turning a title into a URL is more than lowercasing and adding hyphens. The cleanup pipeline has to handle Unicode normalisation (an accented "é" exists in two byte sequences that look identical but compare as different strings), smart-quote replacement (curly apostrophes that word processors auto-insert have to become straight ones or be stripped), HTML-entity decoding (titles pasted from a CMS often contain & instead of&), and emoji removal (an emoji in a slug encodes to a long percent-escape sequence that breaks readability and analytics filtering). The converter above runs each of these steps in order so the output is consistently safe across every CMS, search engine and analytics platform you'll ever paste it into.

Stop words: when to strip and when to keep

Removing stop words ("the", "a", "of", "and") makes URLs shorter and keyword-dense, but blind stripping changes meaning. "The Office" without its stop word becomes "office", which loses the brand reference entirely. "How to use" without stop words becomes "use", which loses the instructional framing. The rule of thumb: strip stop words when they're connective tissue ("guide-to-baking" → "guide-baking" is fine), keep them when they're part of a proper noun, brand name or established phrase. The toggle in the converter lets you decide on a per-batch basis rather than enforcing one rule globally.

Migrating titles to URLs at scale

Bulk title-to-URL conversion is the unsung hero of every CMS migration. When you move from WordPress to Ghost, from Squarespace to Webflow, or from a custom CMS to a headless setup, you need a clean slug for every post — and the old CMS rarely exports them in a usable form. The standard workflow is to export titles from the old system, paste them into a bulk converter, and import the slug column into the new CMS alongside the title and body. The alternative — letting the new CMS auto-generate slugs from titles — usually produces inconsistent results because each platform's algorithm handles edge cases differently. Running the conversion yourself guarantees consistency across the migration.

For sites with significant SEO equity, pair the conversion with a 301 redirect map. Export the old URL alongside the new URL, ship the redirect list, and you preserve link equity through the migration. The few minutes spent on the redirect map saves months of slow recovery from accidental 404s.