I already have hundreds of posts with Cyrillic URLs. What should I do?

Transliteration plugins only work for new posts. For existing ones you have to generate new slugs, update them in the database and be sure to set up 301 redirects from the old addresses. The «generate redirect pairs» button produces a ready-made list for our redirect map generator.

Do Cyrillic URLs affect search rankings?

Google indexes both variants equally well. The problems are practical: in percent-encoded form the address becomes 3–4 times longer, breaks when copied into some messengers and looks unreadable in the search results and in analytics.

Why remove stop words from a slug?

This shortens the address without losing meaning. But do not overdo it: once the slug stops being readable, the gain from shortening is zero. For existing pages it is not worth it at all — changing the address costs more than a few extra characters.

Which scheme should I choose?

For Ukrainian content use KMU-55, the official standard. For Russian use the Cyr-to-Lat scheme, because that is what the most common plugins use, so new posts will be created the same way.

Transliterating Cyrillic titles into URL slugs

Transliteration for URLs: Cyrillic titles into slugs

Paste a list of titles and get ready-made slugs using the official Ukrainian transliteration or the scheme used by WordPress plugins. The tool immediately shows collisions: when two different titles produce the same URL.

Titles or existing slugs One per line. Drop a .txt or .csv here — the file is read locally. Percent-encoded strings (%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B4) are decoded automatically, so you can paste addresses straight from the browser.

Transliteration scheme These are four different ways of writing the same letters.

Maximum length Truncated at a word boundary, not in the middle of a word

Processing г → h (KMU-55) or g (Russian, GOST); х → kh / h / x; щ → shch / sch / shh; и → y or i. This is exactly why English slugify libraries are unsuitable for Ukrainian: a single table is hard-wired inside them, usually the Russian one, and Ukrainian text ends up transliterated by foreign rules. KMU-55 additionally drops the soft sign and the apostrophe and writes зг as zgh, to keep it apart from ж. Remove stop words Prepositions and articles: в, на, з, за, до, від, для, та, і, або, the, a, an, of, for. The words are dropped after transliteration, so the list works for every scheme. If no word is left after the cleanup, the string is kept as is.

Original	Slug	Length
Paste the headings — one per line.

“Old → new” pairs (TSV)

The first column is the address WordPress would build from a Cyrillic title (percent-encoding — that is exactly how it is already indexed), the second is the new slug. If the line was already an address or a path, it goes into the first column unchanged. Pairs where the old and the new value are identical are skipped.

Your headings never leave your browser — transliteration runs locally, with nothing sent to a server.

Why ordinary transliterators are not suitable for URLs

Ukrainian online transliteration services are made for documents: they render the name «Олександр» as «Oleksandr» and stop there. For a page address that is not enough — you also need lower case, spaces and punctuation replaced by hyphens, trimming on a word boundary and a check for duplicates. The second problem is that English-language slugify libraries do not tell Ukrainian and Russian apart. That matters, because the same Cyrillic letters transliterate differently: Ukrainian «г» is h, Russian is g; Ukrainian «и» is y, Russian is i. A library tuned for Russian turns «Гриби» into «Griby» instead of «Hryby». Third come collisions. If two headings produce the same slug, WordPress silently appends «-2». You only find out when you see a strange address in the search results. The tool highlights such cases in advance. The official Ukrainian transliteration is laid down in Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 55 of 27 January 2010. Under it the soft sign and the apostrophe are not rendered at all, and the combination «зг» is rendered as «zgh», to distinguish it from «ж».

Everything for WordPress, web development — and beyond

Transliteration for URLs: Cyrillic titles into slugs

Why ordinary transliterators are not suitable for URLs

Frequently asked questions