A Beginner’s Guide to Free Online Text Tools: Word Count, Case, Slugs and Diffs

Writing on the web involves a lot of fiddly little text jobs: checking a length limit, fixing capitalisation, turning a headline into a tidy web address, or spotting what changed between two versions of a document. Each job takes seconds with the right tool — and each tool on this site is free, with no sign-up required.

Counting words and characters

School essays, job applications, social media bios and product descriptions all come with length limits. Instead of counting by hand, paste your text into the Word Counter to see the word count instantly, along with characters, sentences and reading time. If a form or platform counts characters rather than words, the Character Counter shows totals with and without spaces, so you know exactly where you stand.

Fixing capitalisation in one click

Pasted text from a spreadsheet, a PDF or an email often arrives in the wrong case — everything in capitals, or a headline with random capitalisation. Rewriting it by hand is slow and error-prone. The Case Converter switches your text between UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case and more in a single click. It is one of those tools you will use far more often than you expect.

Building URL slugs

A slug is the readable part of a web address, like the bit after the domain name in this article’s URL. Good slugs are short, lowercase and hyphenated — so “My Great Blog Post!” becomes “my-great-blog-post”. The Slug Generator does the conversion for you: it strips punctuation, replaces spaces with hyphens and lowercases everything. Useful for bloggers, shop owners and anyone who publishes pages online.

Comparing two versions of a text

When someone sends you a revised document, finding exactly what changed can feel like a puzzle. The Text Diff Checker solves it: paste the original into one box and the new version into the other, and it highlights every addition, deletion and edit. It is brilliant for reviewing contracts, proofreading edits and checking that a colleague’s changes are the only changes.

Cleaning up messy text

Text copied from the web often arrives with double spaces, stray line breaks and inconsistent formatting. The Remove Extra Spaces tool tidies it up in one pass. And when you need to replace the same word or phrase dozens of times, the Find Replace Tool handles bulk replacements far faster than doing them one by one in your editor.

A tidy-text workflow

• Draft your text anywhere you like.
• Clean it with the extra-spaces remover and fix the case.
• Measure it against your word or character limit.
• Publish — and generate a clean slug for the page.

Four steps, four free tools, and no account needed for any of them.

Liked this guide? If you have your own tips for working with online text tools, you can contribute a guest article — see our Write for Us page for the submission guidelines.