Why You Shouldn’t Always Remove Stop Words From URLs
If you’re thinking about stripping out stop words like “the”, “a”, “is”, “with” from your URLs to make them look cleaner, don’t enable this option by default in your permalink settings.
Removing stop words can actually harm your SEO and readability because it can change the meaning of the URL. For example, /growing-up-with-hearing-loss/ is NOT the same as /growing-hearing-loss/.
In fact, when I audited 300 URLs on a site where stop words were removed via Yoast, I found that 100 of them read awkwardly. I had to reintroduce stop words to improve clarity and prevent SEO issues.
As you can see, URLs often read much better with stop words, especially when the slug is already short (for example, /what-is-hearing-loss/).
How To Prevent Stop Words From Being Removed
Most SEO tools like Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin include a “remove stop words from slugs” option under SEO → Advanced → Permalinks → Clean up permalinks. Simply uncheck this option to keep stop words.
That’s it! For more permalink structure tips, see this guide. If you have questions, leave a comment below.
Cheers,
