How to change the base prefix for categories?

Want to change the heading prefix in WordPress? By default, WordPress automatically adds the / category / prefix to the url of all categories. In this article I will tell you how to change the url of the headings, and indeed, is it worth it to remove the base prefix?

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Should I change the base prefix for categories?

What Is A Basic Prefix? Do I Need To Change It?

Each section on the wordpress site has its own page and RSS feed. You can view all the posts in the section by going to its archive page.

By default, WordPress adds a “category” as the base prefix to the URLs of the category pages. This helps to differentiate pages and posts from archives of categories and tags.

For example, if you have a heading “News”, then its URL will look like this:

http : // example . com / category / news /

Similarly, WordPress adds prefixes to the URLs of tag archives.

http : // example . com / tag / iphone /

This  SEO friendly url structure  helps users and search bots understand which page they have visited.

Most websites do not need to change the prefix at all. However, if you decide to create a niche site where instead of the word “category” you would like to use another word or phrase, it makes sense to change the basic prefix.

Changes to the Base Category Prefix

In WordPress, you can very easily change the basic prefix. To do this, go to  Settings »Permalinks  and scroll to the" Advanced "section.

Change the base category prefix

In the "Prefix for categories" field, enter the prefix that you would like to use. Similarly, you can change the prefix for labels.

Do not forget to click the “Save Changes” button.

Redirect Settings After Changing The Column Prefix

If you changed the base heading prefix on the new website, then you do not need to do anything extra. However, if you changed the prefix on an already functioning site, then users who visited the old section page will see a 404 error message .

To fix this error, set up a redirect , and make sure that search engines and visitors are correctly redirected to the corresponding page in the section.

To configure a redirect, install and activate the Redirection plugin. For more information, read my walkthrough on how to install the plugin on WordPress.

Once activated, go to the Tools »Redirection page  .

Set the redirect after setting the prefix for the headings

Scroll to the "Add a new redirection" section.

In the "Source URL" field, enter /category/(.*). After that, check the box next to the "regular expressions" option.

In the "Destination URL" field, write the new base column prefix as / topics / $ 1, where do not forget to replace the word "topics" with your column prefix.

Click the Add Redirection button to save the changes.

That's all. Now all visitors and search bots will be redirected to the correct URLs where the new prefix is ​​used.

Removing The Base Prefix

I have been asked more than once how to remove the basic prefix from all the url categories on a WordPress site. This will make the url of the headings look like this:

http : // example . com / news /

This is not a good idea and I recommend not removing the base prefix.

The basic heading prefix helps users and search engines distinguish between posts / pages and headings from each other. By removing the prefix, you will be confused, which is very inconvenient for users and not good for SEO. In addition, this can lead to failure of the plugins. For example, if you have a heading and a page with the same name, or if you use% postname% as the url structure of individual posts, then an endless loop of redirects will occur, because of which the pages will never load.

However, if you still want to remove the prefix, for this you need to download and activate the FV Top Level Categories plugin.

The plugin works out of the box and it will immediately remove the base prefix from the headings URLs.

I hope this article helped you deal with the basic heading prefix and now you can easily change it, but also delete it if necessary. You may also be interested in learning the most useful tricks, htaccess file tricks .

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