I was trying to work out how to remove /category/ from my category URLs and I just couldn’t seem to remove it. For example mydomain.com/category/wordpress. I just wanted to be mydomain.com/wordpress , but I found out a quick trick to achieve this.

To get rid of category you set your permalinks to /%category%/%postname%/ and then set the Category Base to period/dot.

*If you leave the category base blank it will display the wordpress default category.*

1. Go to Setting > Permalinks
2. Select Custom Structure
3. Add /%category%/%postname%/ after your domain
4. Change Category Base to period/dot.

1. Go to Yoast SEO
2. Select advanced
3. Click on the tab permalinks at the top
4. Check Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL.

To remove the category base manually in the .htaccess file just add this line of code.

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This plugin also removes the category base and seems to be very popular as well. I would recommend this method the least because too many plugins will slow your website down and require you to keep more plugins up to date. https://wordpress.org/plugins/remove-category-url/

Conclusion

All four methods above will work for removing the category slug from your URLs. Although I would recommend choosing the method that is going to use less code in your case.