Why accented letters come out as their plain-English equivalent
A title like "Café Près de Montréal" becomes "cafe-pres-de-montreal," not a slug missing those letters entirely - accented characters are first converted to their closest plain-ASCII letter, then the usual lowercasing and hyphenation runs. Without that step, a naive slugifier would simply delete "é" and "è" rather than replace them, producing a mangled or truncated URL for any title that isn't plain English.
What this tool actually converts your text into
Type a page title and this tool lowercases it, strips out punctuation and special characters, and replaces spaces with hyphens - producing a clean, URL-safe slug instantly as you type. It converts the full title as given; it doesn't remove common words like "a," "the," or "of" on its own, so trim any of those out yourself first if you want a shorter slug without them.
Why hyphens are used instead of underscores or spaces
Spaces aren't valid in a URL without being encoded as "%20," which looks cluttered and unreadable, and Google treats a hyphen as a word separator while treating an underscore as joining two words into one token - using hyphens keeps the words in your slug individually matchable against a search query, which an underscore would not.
Why this doesn't automatically remove words like "a," "the," and "of"
Removing stop words can shorten a slug, but which words are safe to drop depends on context - sometimes a short word is actually load-bearing for clarity or meaning. Rather than guess which ones you'd want dropped, this tool converts your title exactly as given and leaves trimming any specific words to you, so the result never removes something you actually wanted to keep.
What makes a slug actually good once it's generated
A clean slug is short, lowercase, uses hyphens, and ideally includes the page's main keyword without stuffing in every related term from the full title - manually shortening the generated slug to just its most essential words, after seeing the full converted version, usually produces a better final URL than using the complete title's slug as-is.