WordPress Plugin to Remove ‘Category Base’
Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.
There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.
WP No Category Base
The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.
There’s one downside to this method (actually the reason why WordPress decided to use the category base). If you’re going to use the same slug for both a page and a category (‘news’ for example), clicking on a link similar to http://yourdomain.com/news/ WILL take you to the category archive, and never to the page. So, be careful when choosing you permalink slug by keeping them unique.
For those using WordPress as CMS and not as a blog engine, this downside might prove useful when creating a page based navigation. Adding a page with a slug ‘news’ will redirect that menu link to the news archive, which is indeed useful.
Download the plugin: WP No Category Base
The plugin works with WordPress versions from 2.3 up to 2.8.4.
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Nice information.
Do we have any similar plugin for blogspot users?
Sorry Malini but I haven’t heard of such thing, nor someone in need of it.
Thanks Alex, but almost everyone moving to WordPress from blogspot
Thank you for this great plugin!
Any chance you could do a similar plugin for the WordPress Tags?
Example:
Old URL = myblog.com/tag/my-tag/
New URL = myblog.com/my-tag/
Thanks,
I am wondering the same as SlimJim. It would be nice if it handled tags as well.
This worked like a charm, especially since every other method I found online was breaking sub category pages. Thanks!
It works also on WP3!
thanks!
This plugin broke my wordpress test site (at http://www.thecoverups.co.uk/wordpress). I think it probably has to do with being in a subdirectory, but no amount of searching has come up with a solution, and the issue persists beyond uninstalling the plugin… which implies to me the coder did somewhat of a slap dash job of coding this.
@Mike: The plugin does not make any changes to WordPress files or database. So it is probably something else that is cause the problem for even after uninstalling it.
Hi there
Is there a problem wit this plugin, it’s not existing any more on wordpress, is there something similar ?
I’ve tried this plugin and I must say that it works very well. As mentioned in the post make sure that you create unique urls….