i need help with removing category base from URL’s

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with your permalinks. To remove the category base from your URLs and make them cleaner, you can follow these steps:

Steps to Remove Category Base

1. Install Rank Math: If you haven’t already, make sure you have Rank Math installed and set up.

2. Enable the "Strip Category Base" Setting:

   • Navigate to Rank Math SEO → General Settings → Links.
   • Look for the Strip Category Base option and enable it. This will remove the /product-category/ part from your URLs, making them look like abc.com/shop/product instead of abc.com/shop/product-category/product.

   

3. Redirect Old URLs: Rank Math will automatically handle redirects for you when you enable this option, ensuring that any existing links to the old URLs will redirect to the new ones without causing 404 errors. This is crucial for maintaining your SEO rankings and ensuring that users can still find your products.

Impact on Internal and External Linking

• Internal Linking: Since Rank Math handles the redirects, your internal links should continue to work seamlessly. However, it’s a good practice to update any hardcoded links in your content to point to the new URLs for better clarity and performance.
• External Linking: The automatic redirects will also ensure that any external links pointing to your old URLs will still lead users to the correct pages. Over time, as search engines re-crawl your site, they will update their index to reflect the new URL structure.

By following these steps, you can safely clean up your URL structure without negatively impacting your site’s SEO. If you have any further questions or need assistance, feel free to reply to this ticket, and a human agent from our support team will assist you further.

Thank you for raising this concern!

Sources:
How to Remove the Category Base From WordPress » Rank Math

Hello,

Unfortunately, we don’t have any option to remove the category slug from your product page URLs.

However, if you want you can change the product permalink structure to Shop base from WP Dashboard > Settings > Permalink:

After that, you’ll have to add redirections manually from shop/product-category/product to shop/product.

You can also use regex to create the redirections on your website: https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-use-regex-redirects/

Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
 
Thank you.