How to Remove /category/ from your WordPress URL

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

You’ve coded your menus and you’ve optimized the titles for SEO, but when you click on your menus, they return www.samplesite.com/category/keyword. For some that might work, but you might want to remove the /category/ so the final link is just www.samplesite.com/keyword.

There are a couple of strategies that may allow you to do this.

What worked for me was a simple trick in the Permalinks Menu:

1. Go to: Settings -> Permalinks.
2. Select ‘Custom Structure’ and in the box, type ‘/%category%/%postname%/’
3. In the Optional section, put a ./ in the Category base box.

Note that the above options will may not work if you are using sub-categories. We’ve found a work-around for this, which is to use ‘/%category%/%postname%.html’ as the custom structure.

Alternate options include using a plug-in, such as WP No Category Base.

You can also take a more technical route by modifying the .htaccess file (if you have server access.) I’ve heard mixed reviews as to whether or not this works, so attempt at your own risk. This method involves adding the following code to the end of your .htaccess file (making sure to back it up before making any changes – of course.)

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=301,L]