Shorter Post Slugs Without Stop Words
Removes filler words such as "the", "and" or "how" from automatically created post slugs and caps their length, giving shorter, cleaner URLs.
Opens WPIDE on
Code
// Words removed from new slugs, and the maximum number of words kept.
$wpide_stop_words = array( 'a', 'an', 'and', 'are', 'as', 'at', 'be', 'by', 'for', 'from', 'how', 'in', 'into', 'is', 'it', 'of', 'on', 'or', 'our', 'the', 'this', 'that', 'to', 'what', 'when', 'why', 'with', 'you', 'your' );
$wpide_slug_max_words = 6;
add_filter( 'wp_insert_post_data', function ( $data, $postarr ) use ( $wpide_stop_words, $wpide_slug_max_words ) {
if ( ! empty( $postarr['post_name'] ) || empty( $data['post_name'] ) || in_array( $data['post_status'], array( 'draft', 'auto-draft', 'pending', 'inherit', 'trash' ), true ) || 'attachment' === $data['post_type'] ) {
return $data;
}
$words = explode( '-', $data['post_name'] );
$kept = array_values( array_diff( $words, $wpide_stop_words ) );
if ( count( $kept ) < 2 ) {
return $data;
}
$slug = implode( '-', array_slice( $kept, 0, $wpide_slug_max_words ) );
if ( $slug !== $data['post_name'] ) {
$data['post_name'] = wp_unique_post_slug( $slug, (int) ( $postarr['ID'] ?? 0 ), $data['post_status'], $data['post_type'], (int) $data['post_parent'] );
}
return $data;
}, 10, 2 );Notes
Only slugs WordPress creates from the title on first publish are changed; slugs you edit by hand are kept. Edit the word list for other languages.
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