How do I drop words like in, for and the from my article URL to make it shorter?

An example from an article title

A blog post title for a café in Riyadh:

The Best Coffee in Riyadh for the Office

In Latin mode with the defaults the slug is:

the-best-coffee-in-riyadh-for-the-office

That is 40 characters. With stop-word removal on:

best-coffee-riyadh-office

Four words went, the twice plus in and for, and the slug is now 25 characters. Anyone reading the URL still knows what the page is about, and that is the test.

Exactly which words are dropped

The English list: a, an, the, and, or, of, in, on, at, to, for, with, is, are, be, by, from, as, that, this, it. The Arabic list covers words such as في, من, إلى, على, مع and a standalone و.

Matching is on whole words only. For English that means 'into' or 'often' are never touched just because they contain 'in' or 'of'. For Arabic it means a joined و is part of its word and stays: قهوة بالهيل والزعفران keeps every word. The و only goes when it is written as a separate word with a space.

When you will regret it

• When the word carries the meaning: 'before' and 'after' are not on the list, but 'from' and 'to' are, so a post such as 'Shipping from Riyadh to Jeddah' loses exactly the words that say which way.
• When the title is a question or a comparison, such as 'this or that', where 'or' and 'this' disappear.
• When the title is a quote or a brand name that includes one of the words, such as a product called 'The One'.

In those cases check the result and put the word back in the result field, which is editable; copy takes whatever you see there.

The steps

1. Open the URL slug generator and type the article title.
2. Turn on 'Remove stop words'.
3. Read the 'Stop words removed' line under the result and compare the slug with the title.
4. Restore any word that carries meaning, then copy the slug.

A title made only of stop words?

Type something like 'in the' with the option on and you do not get an empty slug: it stays in-the and nothing is counted as removed. The option never empties a slug. It works in both Arabic and Latin mode with the same combined list, so the Arabic title أفضل قهوة في الرياض مع التوصيل إلى المنزل loses 3 words and becomes أفضل-قهوة-الرياض-التوصيل-المنزل.