Slug & Handle Generator

Most slug generators answer a question nobody was stuck on. The two that actually bite are different: some names have two correct romanisations, and duplicate handles are fixed silently by the platform in a way that breaks links you already published.

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Müller is both muller and mueller

German expands umlauts — ü becomes ue — while most software simply drops the accent. So Müller Übergrößen is legitimately either muller-ubergrossen or mueller-uebergroessen. Neither is a bug. But they are different URLs, and if you pick the one your German customers do not type, the link they were given elsewhere does not resolve.

The letters where this happens:

ä → a or ae · ö → o or oe · ü → u or ue · å → a or aa · æ → a or ae · ø → o or oe

This tool shows both and picks neither, for the same reason it shows both readings of an ambiguous date: only you know which convention your customers use.

The collision nobody reports

Two products titled Blue Widget produce the same handle. Shopify does not reject the second one — it appends a number, so it quietly becomes blue-widget-1. Nothing in the import report mentions it. Any link, ad or email that already pointed at blue-widget now shows the other product.

Paste your whole title column and the table shows both the slug and what the platform would actually create, so the renames are visible before they happen rather than after.

Why dropped characters are reported

Widget (Large) and Widget – Large both reduce to widget-large. Removing punctuation is necessary and usually harmless, but it is also how two distinct products end up fighting over one URL — so this tool says what it removed rather than doing it quietly.

Every check this tool runs (7 rules)

SLUG-T01 Transliteration is ambiguous

Letters such as ü, ö, ä, ß, ø and æ have two accepted romanisations. German expands them — Müller becomes mueller — while most software simply drops the accent and produces muller. Neither is wrong, but they are different URLs, and picking the one your customers do not use costs you the link.

Fix: Choose deliberately and then be consistent. Both readings are shown; this tool will not pick for you.

Source: Derived from what a URL path segment may contain and from the transliteration conventions of the languages concerned. The ambiguity is real rather than a limitation of this tool: German and Scandinavian conventions expand certain letters where most software simply strips the accent.

SLUG-C01 Characters removed

A URL slug carries lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. Everything else — punctuation, symbols, spaces, characters from other scripts — has to go somewhere, and silently dropping them can turn two different products into the same slug.

SLUG-S01 Non-Latin script cannot be romanised here

Characters from Han, Cyrillic, Arabic and other scripts are dropped rather than romanised. Romanisation is a language-specific decision — the same Han character romanises differently in Mandarin and Japanese — and guessing would produce a confident, wrong URL.

Fix: Write the slug from a romanised or translated version of the name.

SLUG-D01 Duplicate handle

Two rows produce the same handle. Shopify does not reject this — it appends a number, so the second product silently becomes "name-1". Every link you had already published for it now points at the other product, and nothing in the import report mentions it.

Fix: Make the titles distinct, or set the handles explicitly.

Source: Shopify Help — Importing products with a CSV file

SLUG-L01 Very long slug

Nothing enforces a limit, but a slug longer than about 70 characters is truncated in search results, awkward to share, and usually a sign that the whole product title was used where a few identifying words would do.

Fix: Keep the words that distinguish this product from its siblings.

SLUG-E01 Nothing left

After removing everything a URL cannot carry, no characters remain. This happens with titles written entirely in another script, or made only of symbols.

SLUG-N01 Clean slug

Lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens, with no ambiguity about how it was produced.

Characters from Han, Cyrillic, Arabic and other scripts are dropped rather than romanised. Romanisation is language-specific — the same Han character romanises differently in Mandarin and Japanese — so guessing would produce a confident, wrong URL.

Slug & Handle Generator

Müller is both muller and mueller

The collision nobody reports

Why dropped characters are reported

Every check this tool runs (7 rules)

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