Artberri

For a better SEO, it is said that the URLs must give information about the content of the web page. Because of this most people uses pretty URLs in wordpress with the permalink options. But the post slug in the URL is generated from the title of the post, and some times this slug is too long because we don’t remove the stopwords, common words without an important meaning, that don’t add anything significant to the URL.
This plugin removes the stopwords from the URLs for better SEO optimization of your blog and for making better and smaller URLs. You can set the stopwords through the `Plugins’ menu in WordPress wp-admin.
For example:
<ul>
<li>You have set the next stopwords: a, an, the, i, you, he, she, we, they, of</li>
<li>You write a post called: Review of the Google Chrome Browser</li>
<li>The normal post slug would be: review-of-the-google-chrome-browser</li>
<li>But the optimized slug is: review-google-chrome-browser</li>
</ul>
All configuration is done through wp-admin. No code editing is necessary.

Remove Stopwords From Slug

This plugin removes the stopwords from the URLs for better SEO optimization of your blog. You can set the stopwords in the admin panel.

Konstantin Obenland

This plugin replaces the author slug with a sanitized version of the user’s display name.
This plugin will not prevent hackers from finding out your login name but the login name won’t be visible 
in the author archive’s URL, which works towards your friendly URLs with using your display name.
DO NOT use this on a site with more than 1000 registered users, as updating all of their nicenames at once might break your site.

WP Author Slug

Easy way to add some obscurity to login guessing.

But please update as it's over 2 years now.

Excellent

This plugin would probably work OK if you have a small number of users (e.g. if your site doesn't allow public login). But if you have a large number of users (e.g. if you are running ecommerce or allow users to register for other reasons), this plugin will probably take down your site.

The reason is that there are hooks that run when you activate or delete the plugin. It runs database fetch and update queries on every user in your database, all in-line on the request (rather than background via a cron). So if you have a thousand or more users it attempts to do a thousand or more database writes when you click Activate or Delete from the plugins list. This will likely grind your website to a halt. 

It would be better/useable if you could either choose to only apply these scripts to specific user types (e.g. Author) or if you could run the update in batches in the background.

Don't use if you have a large user database

Add a layer of security and prevent your login name from being shown in the author archive's URL.

Remove Stopwords From Slug vs WP Author Slug