When you view a category page on your WordPress website, its URL, by default, has a /category/ segment in it. For example, a URL for the “News” category will look something like this: https://example.com/category/news/.
But maybe you don’t want to display their default name, “category”, in your URLs, or you want to remove it completely. So you might want to have URLs like: https://example.com/news/ or https://example.com/topics/news/
Today, we’ll tackle two related small changes you might want to make to remove /category/ from WordPress category URLs: removal of that URL segment and a rename.
Renaming /category/ to something else is a common use case, and as we’ll get to in a minute. (It’s basically included as a WordPress setting already.) It’s a little more complicated to remove /category/ from URLs entirely.
Remove /category/ from WordPress URLs
To completely remove the /category/ segment from our category URLs in WordPress, we’ll be using a plugin: No Category Base (WPML).
Here are the steps we’ll need:
- In the admin area of your site, go to Plugins > Add New.
- Search for “No Category Base (WPML).” You’ll install and activate the plugin from this screen. To do that, first click the Install button on the plugin listing, then once that has changed to an Activate button, click that as well.
- You’re done, you’ve removed
/category/from WordPress URLs. With the plugin installed and activated, there’s not really anything else to do. It has no setting screen.
This video walks your througth the steps outlined above:
Change WordPress Category Base
As I said, you can use a setting called WordPress “Category base” to just change the word category to something else, like topic or genre. This is useful if you don’t mind the extra length of the URL and are just looking to make your site more personal. Here’s how you’ll do that:
- In your site’s admin area, navigate to Settings > Permalinks
- Scroll down to the “Optional” heading. There you’ll see two input fields: Category base and Tag base. To change the way your categories appear in your WordPress site URLs, you’ll add whatever value you want to the Category base input.
- Click Save Changes.
The plugin, No Category Base (WPML), worked like a charm! Thanks!
Other sites were saying to change the permalink, Custom Structure, to /%category%/%postname%/ then put a dot or period in Category Base under Optional. This was making the link point to a page instead of the Category post, so if there was a page with the same name as the Category, it would display the page and not the category post and if there was not a corresponding page I would get an error page. Neither was what I was looking to do.
So, thank you for this easy solution. I was only leery because I didn’t want to add another plugin to the site.
Hi, how do we “redirect all /category/ URLs to their corresponding new URLs via 301.” – that’s something that concerns me.
Sounds simple if you do it a lot, but, like others my site is well established (almost 4 years), has many external links to my site. I’d like to get rid of /category/ in the url without breaking anything and ensuring no link love or broken links etc etc.
If you remove the category from the URL on a site, does that effect the search engine listings that have already been created?
If they’ve been indexed by search engines, then yes. General rule of thumb: Never change your URLs without valid reason, e. g. in the course of a website relaunch. If you only consider doing this for optical reasons (URL looks nicer), I would highly advise not to, especially if it affects a large amount of URLs with good SERP rankings. If you do decide to change the URL structure though, make sure to redirect all /category/ URLs to their corresponding new URLs via 301.