WordPress has it's uses, even today, but it has a few quirks that don't make any sense. An interesting one is it's use of Category as a prefix to a URL and title. This might make sense for ecommerce where a category is a category and unless we specify it as a category it might not make sense, for example you might have a product called "Blue Socks" and a category called "Blue Socks" which contains all the socks that can be blue and the product called Blue Socks. A bit of an arbitrary example but this is pretty common.
Now, let's look at a usual website. We might have a category called "Services" and a category called "Projects", these are groups of content given a descriptive name, we do not need to tell people or search engines that they are categories. A project is part of a group of projects and a service is part of a group of services, we will not have a project called Project that people may look for.
It's all semantics, but as SEO is based on semantics, the distinction is important. So how do we get rid of these strange quirks?
Title
The most simple way is to change theme, but if you have a theme you like, but your categories all have that prefix "Category: " and you want to remove it it is very simple
- Login
- Go to any category page on your site
- At the top, hit Edit Site
- Click the title
- On the left under the Block tab you will see "Show archive type in the title", untick that
- Hit Save at the top right
That's it, simple.
URL
No one is searching for categories, so having it appear as one of your main keywords for your website is just maddening. Let's remove it from your URLs:
- Login
- Go to your Dashboard
- Select Settings -> Permalinks on the left
- Scroll down to Category base and add a dot '.' into the field
- Hit Save Changes at the bottom
All URLs with a dot in them do not render the dot so a URL that is was https://trampcreative.co.uk/category/services/ becomes https://trampcreative.co.uk/./services/ dots are not rendered and neither are double forward slashes so we get https://trampcreative.co.uk/services/
Now, if only we could remove the word collection from Shopify URLs.