When you view a category page on your WordPress website, its URL usually has a /category/ segment in it. For example, a URL for the “News” category will look something like this: https://example.com/category/news/
This is all fine from a technical point of view, but maybe you don’t want to display that default part – “category” – in your URLs and would rather remove it completely. This can give you much cleaner site URLs like: https://example.com/news/.
In this post, I’ll show you how to get that done in literally 30 seconds. Plus, I’ll also show you what to do if you don’t want to remove it, but just rename it to something other than “category”.
Remove /category/ from WordPress URLs
To completely remove the /category/ part of your category URLs, all you need to do is just install and activate one plugin:
Then, the plugin will take care of everything on its own.
Here’s how:
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New.
- Search for “Remove Category URL.” It’s this one:
- Install and activate the plugin by clicking first on the Install button on the plugin listing, then once that has changed to an Activate button, click that as well.
- You’re done! The sole act of activating this plugin will remove
/category/from your WordPress category URLs. There’s nothing else for you to do. The plugin has no setting screen.
Let me show you a quick before and after:
This is what your category link looks like by default:
This is what it looks like after installing the “Remove Category URL” plugin:
I don’t want to remove it, I just want to rename it to something other than “category”
Okay, so getting rid of the category sub-URL completely is not the only solution you have. And it’s also not always the right solution. After all, having something like that (or similar) in your URLs makes it really clear that what the visitor is looking at is indeed a category listing.
Moreover, it helps with managing your site with SEO or rank tracking tools. For example, if you see addresses like https://yoursite.com/gift-ideas/ or https://yoursite.com/lawyers-in-london/ in ahrefs or similar tool, it might not be immediately obvious which of them is, in fact, a category page.
But you’re still tired of the default /category/, right? Good news, you can change it pretty easily:
- In your WordPress dashboard, go 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. For example, you can set it to “topics”, as I did above.
Click Save Changes when you’re done.
When you go to view any of your posts now, and hover over the category link, you’ll see that new “category base” in the URL:
This is it! I hope this quick advice has been helpful.
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This won’t work anymore for WPML + Block Theme.
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.