When you have a WordPress website and you install Woocommerce you will have to have a base URL for your store. This is set in the permalink settings and it is usually either set to “product” or “store.

remove /product & /product-category from woocommerce urls

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If you navigate to Settings > Permalink’s you will see the following options for your store.

Standard
Shop base
Shop base with category
Custom Base

We tend to set out URL on /shop/%product_cat% so the base category for your store is Shop to make it easy for your customers.

The thing is many websites prefer not to have this in the URL or the breadcrumbs of their website. It affects the Information Architecture of your sites SEO. Some people prefer to remove the “Shop” section from their website to keep it aligned with the SEO optimized URL’s for the rest of their store. I also came across this issue to remove /product & /product-category from Woocommerce urls.

There is one free option available to remove product category base Woocommerce. You can do this by installing the WordPress plugin SEO Ultimate. If you navigate to SEO > Miscellaneous and scroll down you will see the option below. You can remove the product category from the permalink tweaker.

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Though the issue with this is that when you click on the product item, it will still effect the Woocommerce perfect seo url. It will not allow Woocommerce remove shop from url -product-category. So the products will still show the URL though it will be removed at a category level.

Your category level URL’s will look like this:

http://yourstore.com/category/product

Your product base level URL’s will look like this:

http://yourstore.com/shop/category/product

This is the issue with with removing the category base URL’s. It is not so good when Woocommerce remove shop from url -product-category, though it does not remove it from the product level URL.

Woocommerce perfect seo url

This is a paid plugin which is developed with some great features.

Multiple product URL’s with Woocommerce Products

It is possible to add a Woocommerce product to multiple categories which will create duplicate content for these products. The Woocommerce perfect seo url plugin will update this issue automatically.

Google friendly URL’s

This plugin removes the unnecessary slug “/product” and “/product-category. It sill improve your SEO optimized URL structure and increase your rankings slightly by allowing you to have a clean structure for your store’s information architecture

Redirect Old URL’s for your Woocommerce categories

Old products URL’s and categories will be automatically redirected to the new ones created. This will keep you from getting 404 crawl errors in Google, with your new shops URL’s.

No duplicate content

This is one of the bigger issues with having products in multiple categories. This product will make sure you have one unique URL with the use of canonical URL redirects. As this is an automated feature of the plugin you won’t have to do this manually with a 301 redirect plugin.

Plug and Play

Once installed there is no programming knowledge needed, you will just need to enter your application key from your purchase and press one button. The plugin will automate the whole process for your store.

Some negative points about the Woocommerce perfect seo url when it removes the unnecessary slug “/product” and “/product-category

This plugin when purchased is for one site only. It can’t be used for multiple stores which is not such a good thing for price marketing. This is not made clear before purchase. This is the only plugin on the market which will attempt for Woocommerce change product category slug. So keep this In mind before purchasing. If you would like to use the plugin for more then one site you will need to purchase a developers license.

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Update 2019 – A free WordPress plugin to update the permalink category slug in Woocommerce URL’s

There is a now a free option available which does everything that is needed to remove the category slug and update what is needed so you can have your URL’s optimized for SEO.

Also to add to the excitement it has the following features:

• It is compatible with Yoast SEO
• WPML WooCommerce Multilingual compatible for multisite installations
• Automatic adding of the ‘rel=canonical’ attribute to duplicate pages to improve SEO
• Supports Woocommerce stores with a large number of products (has been tested with sites that have over 100,000 products)

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