How to Change the Category Base Prefix in WordPress

We got several requests asking the same question: How to modify the category base prefix in WordPress? Well there is a very easy way to change the category base prefix, but there is no real solution to completely remove this prefix. In this article we will show you how to change the category base prefix in WordPress, and we will also touch base on a possible way that will allow you to remove the category prefix entirely.

What is a Category Base Prefix?

In your URL structure, you will see something like this http://yoursite.com/category/wordpress

That word category is the base prefix that all WordPress blogs will have as long as they are not using the default permalink structure.

How to Change / Modify the Category Base Prefix?

It is really easy to change that prefix to anything you like. For examples then your URL would look like yourdomain.com/articles/wordpress

First you would need to go in your WP-Admin Panel and go to Settings » Permalinks

There you would see an Optional box which allows you to change the category base prefix and the tag base prefix. (Example Below)

Simply add the text that you like, and you are done. This way is guaranteed to work because it is a hard-coded option within WordPress.

How to Remove Category Base Prefix in WordPress

There is no bug free way to get this done. For those who want no problems with their site, we recommend that you do not even try this because it can lead to problems. There is a plugin that allows you to completely get rid of the prefix, so it would be yourdomain.com/wordpress rather than yourdomain.com/category/wordpress. This plugin is called Top Level Directories.

Known Issues:

This plugin will not work if you have a permalink structure like %postname or %category%/%postname% and there is currently no workaround.

If you add a suffix to your permalink structure (such as .html) you can fix this issue. For example, try %category%/%postname%.html – This is not ideal, but there is no good solution for this issue.

For now we suggest that you stick with a modified base prefix if necessary. All we can do is hope that WordPress adds this feature in the future versions.