How to remove product-category slug in woocommerce

We were working with an agency that requires SEO-friendly URLs for the WooCommerce categories. By default, WooCommerce injects product-category into all their category URLs.

In this article, we will discuss changing the product-category slug and completely removing the product-category slug in WooCommerce.

Table of content

• Change the product-category slug
• Permanently Remove the product-category slug

Change the product-category slug

If you would like to change the product-category slug to something different, then you can achieve that by following these simple steps.

1. Go to the WordPress admin dashboard and navigate Settings > Permalinks.
2. Locate the Optional > Product category base option
3. Now you can replace the product-category slug with the desired one.

Permanently Remove product-category slug

From an SEO point of view, the URL-like /product-category/clothing is an undesirable URL structure as compared to simple /clothing. Where clothing is a category. That is why sometimes we are required to remove the product-category slug from the URL.

You can do that by pasting the below snippet to the functions.php file.

add_filter('request', 'wrg_remove_category_slug');
add_filter('term_link', 'wrg_term_link_filter', 10, 3);

function wrg_remove_category_slug($vars) {
    global $wpdb;
    if (!empty($vars['pagename']) || !empty($vars['category_name']) || !empty($vars['name']) || !empty($vars['attachment'])) {
        
        $slug = !empty($vars['pagename']) ? $vars['pagename'] : (!empty($vars['name']) ? $vars['name'] : (!empty($vars['category_name']) ? $vars['category_name'] : $vars['attachment']));
        $exists = $wpdb - > get_var($wpdb - > prepare("SELECT t.term_id FROM $wpdb->terms t LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id WHERE tt.taxonomy = 'product_cat' AND t.slug = %s", array($slug)));
        
        if ($exists) {
            $old_vars = $vars;
            $vars = array('product_cat' => $slug);
            if (!empty($old_vars['paged']) || !empty($old_vars['page'])) $vars['paged'] = !empty($old_vars['paged']) ? $old_vars['paged'] : $old_vars['page'];
            if (!empty($old_vars['orderby'])) $vars['orderby'] = $old_vars['orderby'];
            if (!empty($old_vars['order'])) $vars['order'] = $old_vars['order'];
        }
    }
    return $vars;
}

function wrg_term_link_filter($url, $term, $taxonomy) {
    $url = str_replace("/product-category/", "/", $url);
    return $url;
}

Need Help?

If you find this hard to implement yourself, you can contact us for help.

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