The default setting in WordPress generates permanent links of the type: http://mydomain.com/category/our-web-content, however I believe the word category provides very little to our visitors and does not favor SEO. We can remove category safely from our links and this is recommended in many places.
There are many ways to do it. As usual, WordPress has a plugin for this: Remove Category Url. This is the easy way: download the plugin, activate it and done. However, we who try to use the least amount of plugins, we always look for an alternative method.
Remove category through Yoast SEO
Nearly all of us use a plugin to manage SEO in our web. If you are like me, you use Yoast SEO, and the issue is no more. You simply activate the corresponding option in the control panel in Yoast.
Remove category in Settings
What if we don't use Yoast? In this case we can do it directly from the option: Settings => Permanent Links
We simply need to include "%category%" within our custom structure and put "." as Base Category and Base Tag.
This functionality also works if we want to change the text, for example, if we write "theme" as our Base Category, our url would be of the type:
http://mydomain.com/theme/web-content
Conclusion
As we have seen, it is very easy to modify the structure of permanent links in our website so they look friendlier.
We must not forget that whenever we do modifications like these we must save the permanent links once again in Settings, so as to avoid error 404. We also need to redirect old published urls to the new ones through 301.
