Should I remove stop words from WordPress slugs?
Trim them on new posts when the shorter slug still makes sense, and never go back to strip them from published URLs. WordPress itself removes no words at all: it only lowercases the title, drops punctuation and joins what is left with hyphens. Stop words are a readability choice, not a ranking one.
What WordPress does to a title
The slug is produced by one core function, and it is a character filter, not a language filter. Given the title How to Choose the Best Grinder for a Small Café (2026), it:
- converts accented Latin letters to plain ones (
étoe); - lowercases everything;
- removes HTML entities and turns full stops into hyphens;
- deletes any character that is not a letter, digit, space, underscore or hyphen, so brackets, question marks and apostrophes vanish;
- turns spaces into hyphens and collapses repeated hyphens into one.
The result is how-to-choose-the-best-grinder-for-a-small-cafe-2026. Every word survives, including to, the, for and a. There is no stop word list in core, in any language. If your slugs come out shorter than your titles, a plugin or your own editing did that.
Does a stop word in the URL matter to Google?
Google's guidance on URLs asks for readable, descriptive words and hyphens between them. It gives no list of words to avoid and no length that ranks better. Words in a URL are at most a very light signal; nobody ranks because the was removed.
The practical differences are for people:
- A shorter slug is easier to read in a result, a chat message or a printed slide.
- Long slugs get cut off in some interfaces, so the distinctive words should come early.
- A slug that drops too much stops making sense.
/guide-wordpress/could be anything.
So the test is not "is this a stop word" but "does the slug still say what the page is".
Words that change the meaning if you cut them
Small words sometimes carry the whole point. Compare:
| Title | Stripped slug | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee Without Caffeine | coffee-caffeine | Now says the opposite |
| Flights to Paris vs from Paris | flights-paris-paris | Direction lost |
| How Not to Rebuild a Site | how-rebuild-site | Negation lost |
| The Who: Album Guide | who-album-guide | Name broken |
| Notes on A/B Testing | notes-b-testing | Term broken |
Automatic stripping cannot tell these cases apart, which is why we prefer editing the slug by hand. Keep prepositions and negations that carry meaning, drop articles and filler around them. how-to-choose-the-best-grinder-for-a-small-cafe-2026 becomes choose-grinder-small-cafe, and it still reads as a sentence fragment a person would recognise.
The URL slug generator has a stop word switch so you can see both versions before deciding.
What to do on a live site
For new posts, set the slug before publishing. That costs nothing: no redirect, no reindexing. Aim for three to five words that would still be accurate if the headline changed.
For published posts, leave the slug as it is. Shortening /how-to-choose-the-best-grinder/ to /choose-grinder/ trades a working, indexed address for a redirect and a wait, in exchange for a benefit nobody has measured. WordPress will redirect a post's old slug by itself, but each change is still a URL move that Google has to process.
The exception is a slug that is actually wrong: a leftover working title, a typo, a year that is no longer true. Fix those once, and make sure the old address redirects. In Hydrogen SEO, Auto Redirection in the Redirection Manager records the 301 for posts, pages and terms when you change a published slug.
Common questions
Does WordPress have a built-in stop word list for slugs?
No. Core keeps every word of the title and only filters characters. Any stop word removal comes from a plugin or from editing the slug yourself.
Is a shorter slug always better?
Shorter is easier to read, but only while it stays descriptive. A two-word slug that could describe fifty different pages is worse than a five-word one that describes yours.
Should the slug contain my keyword?
It should describe the page, which normally means the main term is in it. Repeating the term or adding variants does nothing useful and reads as stuffing.
Do numbers count as words to remove?
Keep a number when it is part of the subject, such as a model name. Drop it when it is a list count or a year that will change.