Remove Category Base in WordPress

Written by Jean Galea
Written by Jean Galea
Want to remove the useless /category/ from your WordPress categories permalinks? If yes, put this code in your functions.php and you're done!

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Here’s how to remove your category base in WordPress:

[php]
/*——————
Remove Category Base
——————-*/

function remove_cat_base( $string, $type )
{
global $wp_rewrite;
if ( $wp_rewrite->use_trailing_slashes == false )
{
if ( $type != ‘single’ && $type != ‘category’ )
return trailingslashit( $string );

if ( $type == ‘single’ && ( strpos( $string, ‘.html/’ ) !== false ) )
return trailingslashit( $string );

if ( $type == ‘category’ && ( strpos( $string, ‘category’ ) !== false ) )
{
$aa_g = str_replace( "/category/", "/", $string );
return trailingslashit( $aa_g );
}
if ( $type == ‘category’ )
return trailingslashit( $string );
}
return $string;
}

add_filter( ‘user_trailingslashit’, ‘remove_cat_base’, 55, 2 );
[/php]

This article was filed in our archives.
Written by Jean Galea
Jean Galea is an investor, entrepreneur, and blogger. He is the founder of WP Mayor, the plugins WP RSS Aggregator and Spotlight, as well as the Mastermind.fm podcast. His personal blog can be found at jeangalea.com.

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9 Responses

  1. Good post and comments
    If I use WordPress SEO, what happens to backlinks that contain the category base already? Will people be still redirected to the same post with new URL structure? 10x for your reply

  2. With new Yoast WordPress SEO you can now do it just with choosing an option in settings 🙂

    1. You have to add it in the theme’s functions.php file. There are also some plugins that implement this in the WordPress repository, although I haven’t tested them recently.

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